LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap Copyright No 

Shelf ^K?S 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Drua\a\ond's 
Addresses 



l\THK GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD 

TAX VOBISCUM 

THE CHANGED LIFE 

'FIRST!"— A TALK WITH BOYS 

HOW TO LEARN HOW 

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 

THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE 




CHICAGO 

V. B. CONKEY COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



1l 



37821 



Dt>r**i y of Con^irft»» 

AUG 23 1900 
SECOND COPY. 

Delivered t» 

ORDER DIVISION, 

AUG a? wo 









Copyright, 1900, by W. B. Conkev Company. 



68731 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF PRO- 
FESSOR DRUMMOND. 

The author of these remarkable addresses 
was born in Scotland in 185 i„ and studied for 
the University of Edinburgh in private schools 
in his native city of Stirling. After gradua- 
tion here he continued his studies in Tubin- 
gen, Germany. He early gave signs of 
special promise, and it was decided that he 
should enter on the career of the ministry; 
and after his ordination he was appointed to a 
mission station at Malta. It was in the leisure 
of this rather solitary work that he was en- 
abled to find time to turn his thoughts more 
entirely to the subject he has since treated in 
lecture and book, although it was not until 
long afterward that these efforts were made 
public. 

On his return to Scotland he was appointed 
a lecturer in science at the Glasgow Free 
Church College ; and it was at this period that 
his first book, "Natural Law in the Spiritual 
World," made its tremendous sensation, run- 
ning through endless editions at home and 
abroad and in every language. The first edi- 
tion of this book bears the imprint of 1883, 
and led to his promotion to a professorship in 
the same college. 

The success of the opening address in the 
3 



4 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

present volume, when reprinted, was as instan- 
taneous, and even wider, than that of his first 
book. 

Professor Drummond never seemed to have 
been troubled with any absorbing ambition to 
publish his work, and the list of volumes 
which bear his name is small ; at least one of 
them being the result of finding a stenogra- 
pher's incomplete notes printed and for sale in 
a bookstore. 

Doubtless part of the secret of his success is 
his simplicity and clearness of style, and the 
fortunate choice of subjects which, at the mo- 
ment of publication, were absorbing the 
thinking world. He has something to say, 
and knows how to say it, and does so without 
any reference to the number of pages it will 
make, should it ever be put in type. In this 
way he can take up even a commonplace sub- 
ject and discuss it with an original style and 
infuse freshness into it. 

There is no better example of this than the 
first two addresses in this book, the text of 
which is the oft-quoted eulogy of St. Paul's for 
the love that never faileth and the promise of 
Christ of rest for the heavy-laden. Many a 
preacher would hesitate to select these well- 
known sentences for his sermon, but Professor 
Drummond has found the happy art of mak- 
ing them seem like new truths; and original- 
ity, after all, is only the art of saying better 
what has been said before. 

Professor Dummond is an ordained minister 
in the Free Church of Scotland, and is en- 



OF PROFESSOR DRUMMOND. 5 

gaged Sundays, during the University sessions 
at Edinburgh, in religious work among the 
students, where his meetings have been 
attended often by as many as five or six hun- 
dred ; and while at home or abroad, his work 
has done much to help the cause of Christian 
living among young men, the University Set- 
tlement school being the outgrowth of his 
words and example. During the week he is 
teaching science from his professor's chair at 
Glasgow, which is a peculiar attachment for a 
divinity school, and one not found in America ; 
but scientific study is earnestly pursued in 
such schools in Scotland. 

In the former work he has had as great suc- 
cess as in the latter, and has been the right- 
hand man of the evangelist, Mr. Moody, in 
many of his mass meetings, which shows the 
deep interest he takes in spreading evangelical 
truth. 

Professor Drummond's appearance and man- 
ner are well known in this country ; and, in- 
deed, it was at Northfield that the first address 
in the present volume was delivered. A great 
scholar and divine has given the following 
analysis of the elements of his success : — 

"He has a certain magnetic quality, both as 
a writer and a speaker, but it can be analyzed. 
He has a style, — not a style to move 'the lonely 
rapture of lonely minds, ' but one which arrests 
the busy crowd, — clear, pleasant, flowing with 
faint hues of poetry. He is never allusive, 
superior, strained ; he does not condescend ; he 
is always himself, — a courteous, unaffected 



6 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

gentleman, with a sincere respect for his audi- 
ence. He is an adept in the art of translating 
scientific ideas into common English, and can 
impart the touch that redeems the familiar 
from platitude. Then he has a message, a 
secret. No one can hope long to touch men 
by mere cleverness or rhetorical skill. Can he 
guide me? comes to be the question at last. 
Those who find the right road from the 
blows they receive on the right hand and the 
left when deviating into wrong roads are grate- 
ful for a wisdom which comes more easily; and 
Mr. Drummond is nothing, if not practical. 
He has a system as well as a message. The 
man of one idea is not so powerful as he used 
to be. The age dreads nothing so much as the 
Bore, but it does not always discriminate. 
But a man with a system, provided he is not 
continually rattling the skeleton, is the man 
of influence. A brilliant preacher of the day 
humorously compares his sermons to little 
heaps of earth flung up by a mole : they make 
a track. In the same way, Mr. Drummond's 
ideas have a continuity. That one-half of his 
scheme of thought is studiously kept out of 
sight does not lessen the interest taken in it; 
and, like all men whose ideas are coherent, he 
gives the impression of being at peace in 
thought." 



THE GREATEST THING IN THE 
WORLD. 



Every one has asked himself the great ques- 
tion of antiquity as of the modern world: 
What is the summum bonunt — the supreme 
good? You have life before you. Only once 
you can live it. What is the noblest object to 
desire, the supreme gift to covet? 

We have been accustomed to be told that 
the greatest thing in the religious world is 
Faith. That great word has been the key- 
note for centuries of the popular religion; and 
we have easily learned to look upon it as the 
greatest thing in the world. Well, we are 
wrong. If we have been told that, we may 
miss the mark. I have taken you, in the chap- 
ter which I have just read, to Christianity at 
his source; and there we have seen, "The 
greatest of these is love. ' ' It is not an over- 
sight. Paul was speaking of faith just a mo- 
ment before. He says, "If I have all faith, 
so that I can remove mountains, and have not 
love, I am nothing. ' ' So far from forgetting 
he deliberately contrasts them. "Now abid- 
eth Faith, Hope, Love," and without a mo- 
ment's hesitation the decision falls, "The 
greatest of these is Love/' 



8 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

And it is not prejudice. A man is apt to rec- 
ommend to others his own strong point. 
Love was not Paul's strong point. The observ- 
ing student can detect a beautiful tenderness 
growing and ripening all through his char- 
acter as Paul gets old; but the hand that 
wrote, /'The greatest of these is love," when 
we meet it first, is stained with blood. 

Nor is this letter to the Corinthians peculiar 
in singling out love as the summum bonum. 
The masterpieces of Christianity are agreed 
about it. Peter says, " Above all things have 
fervent love among yourselves. ' ' Above all 
things. And John goes farther, "God is love." 
And you remember the profound remark 
which Paul makes elsewhere, "Love is the 
fulfilling of the law." Did you ever think 
what he meant by that? In those days men 
were working the passage to Heaven by keep- 
ing the Ten Commandments, and the hundred 
and ten other commandments which they had 
manufactured out of them. Christ said, I will 
show you a more simple way. If you do one 
thing, you will do these hundred and ten 
things, without ever thinking about them. 
If you love, you will unconsciously fulfill the 
whole law. And you can readily see for your- 
selves how that must be so. Take any of the 
commandments. "Thou shalt have no other 
gods before Me." If a man love God, you will 
not require to tell him that. Love is the ful- 
filling of that law. "Take not His name in 
vain." Would he ever dream of taking his 
name in vain if he loved him? "Remember 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 9 

the Sabbath day to keep it holy. ' ' Would he 
not be too glad to have one day in seven to 
dedicate more exclusively to the object of his 
affection? Love would fulfill all these laws 
regarding God. And so, if he loved Man, you 
would never think of telling him to honor his 
father and mother. He could not do anything 
else. It would be preposterous to tell him 
not to kill. You could only insult him if you 
suggested that he should not steal — how could 
he steal from those he loved? It would be 
superfluous to beg him not to bear false wit- 
ness against his neighbor. If he loved him it 
would be the last thing he would do. And 
you would never dream of urging him not to 
covet what his neighbors had. He would 
rather they possessed it than himself. In this 
way, "Love is the fulfilling of the law. " It 
is the rule for fulfilling all rules, the new 
commandment for keeping all the old com- 
mandments, Christ's one secret of the Christian 
life. 

Now Paul has learned that; and in this 
noble eulogy he has given us the most wonder- 
ful and original account extant of the summum 
bonum. We may divide it into three parts. 
In the beginning of the short chapter, we have 
Love contrasted; in the heart of it, we have 
Love analyzed ; toward the end, we have Love 
defended as the supreme gift. 



10 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 



THE CONTRAST. 

Paul begins by contrasting Love with other 
things that men in those days thought much 
of. I shall not attempt to go over these things 
in detail. Their inferiority is already obvious. 

He contrasts it with eloquence. And what 
a noble gift it is, the power of playing upon 
the souls and wills of men, and rousing them 
to lofty purposes and holy deeds. Paul says, 
"If I speak with the tongues of men and of 
angels, and have not love, I am become as 
sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. " And 
we all know why. We have all felt the brazen- 
ness of words without emotion, the hollowness, 
the unaccountable unpersuasiveness, of elo- 
quence behind which lies no Love. 

He contrasts it with prophecy. He contrasts 
it with mysteries. He contrasts it with faith. 
He contrasts it with charity. Why is Love 
greater than faith? Because the end is greater 
than the means. And why is it greater than 
charity? Because the whole is greater than 
the part. Love is greater than faith, because 
the end is greater than the means. What is 
the use of having faith? It is to connect the 
soul with God. And what is the object of con- 
necting man with God? That he may become 
like God. But God is Love. Hence, Faith, 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 11 

the means, is in order to Love, the end. Love, 
therefore, obviously is greater than faith. It 
is greater than charity, again, because the whole 
is greater than a part. Charity is only a little 
bit of Love, one of the innumerable avenues of 
Love, and there may even be, and there is, a 
great deal of charity without Love. It is a very 
easy thing to toss a copper to a beggar on the 
street ; it is generally an easier thing than not 
to do it. Yet Love is just as often in the with- 
holding. We purchase relief from the sympa- 
thetic feelings roused by the spectacle of mis- 
ery, at the copper's cost. It is too cheap — too 
cheap for us, and often too dear for the beggar. 
If we really loved him we would either do 
more for him, or less. 

Then Paul contrasts it with sacrifice and 
martyrdom. And I beg the little band of 
would-be missionaries — and I have the honor 
to call some of you by this name for the first 
time — to remember that though you give your 
bodies to be burned, and have not Love, it 
profits nothing — nothing! You can take noth- 
ing greater to the heathen world than the im- 
press and reflection of the Love of God upon 
your own character. That is the universal 
language. It will take you years to speak in 
Chinese, or in the dialects of India. From the 
day you land, that language of Love, under- 
stood by all, will be pouring forth its uncon- 
scious eloquence. It is the man who is the 
missionary, it is not his words. His character 
is his message. In the heart of Africa, 
among the great Lakes, I have come across 



12 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

black men and women who remembered the 
only white man they ever saw before — David 
Livingstone ; and as you cross his footsteps in 
that dark continent, men's faces light tip as 
they speak of the kind doctor who passed there 
years ago. They could not understand him ; 
but they felt the love that beat in his heart. 
Take into your new sphere of labor, where you 
also mean to lay down your life, that simple 
charm, and your lifework must succeed. You 
can take nothing greater, you need take noth- 
ing less. It is not worth while going if you 
take anything less. You may take every ac- 
complishment ; you may be braced for every 
sacrifice; but if you give your body to be 
burned, and have not Love, it will profit you 
and the cause of Christ nothing. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 13 



THE ANALYSIS. 

After contrasting Love with these things, 
Paul, in three verses, very short, gives us an 
amazing analysis of what this supreme thing 
is. 1 ask you to look at it. It is a compound 
thing, he tells us. It is like light. As you 
have seen a man of science take a beam of 
light and pass it through a crystal prism, as 
you have seen it come out on the other side of 
the prism broken up into its component colors 
— red, and blue, and yellow, and violet, and 
orange, and all the colors of the rainbow — so 
Paul passes this thing, Love, through the mag- 
nificent prism of his inspired intellect, and it 
comes out on the other side broken up into its 
elements. And in these few words we have 
what one might call the Spectrum of Love, 
the analysis of Love. Will you observe what 
its elements are? Will you notice that they 
have common names; that they are virtues 
which we hear about every day; that they 
are things which can be practiced by every 
man in every place in life; and how, by a 
multitude of small things and ordinary virtues, 
the supreme things, the summum bonum, is 
made up? 

The Spectrum of Love has nine ingredients : 



14 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 



Patience . . 

Kindness . . 

Generosity . 

Humility . . 

Courtesy . . 
Unselfishness 
Good Temper 
Guilelessness 
Sincerity . . 



"Love suffereth long." 

"And is kind." 

"Love envieth not." 

"Love vaunteth not itself, is not 

puffed up." 
"Doth not behave itself unseemly. " 
"Seeketh not her own." 
"Is not easily provoked." 
"Thinketh no evil." 
"Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but re- 

joiceth in the truth." 



Patience ; kindness ; generosity ; humility ; 
courtesy; unselfishness; good temper; guile- 
lessness; sincerity; — these make up the su- 
preme gift, the stature of the perfect man. 
You will observe that all are in relation to men, 
in relation to life, in relation to the known to- 
day and the near to-morrow, and not to the un- 
known eternity. We hear much of love to 
God ; Christ spoke much of love to man. We 
make a great deal of peace with heaven ; Christ 
made much of peace on earth. Religion is not 
a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of 
the secular life, the breathing of an eternal 
spirit through this temporal world. The su- 
preme thing, in short, is not a thing at all, but 
the giving of a further finish to the multitu- 
dinous words and acts which make up the sum 
of every common day. 

There is no time to do more than make a 
passing note upon each of these ingredients. 
Love is Patience. This is the normal attitude 
of Love; Love passive, Love waiting to begin; 
not in a hurry; calm; ready to do its work 
when the summons comes, x but meantime 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 15 

wearing the ornament of a meek and quiet 
spirit. Love suffers long ; beareth all things ; 
belie veth all things; hopeth all things. For 
Love understands, and therefore waits. 

Kindness. Love active. Have you ever 
noticed how much of Christ's life was spent in 
doing kind things — in merely doing kind 
things? Run ovor it with that in view, and 
you will find that He spent a great proportion 
of His time simply in making people happy, in 
doing good turns to people. There is only one 
thing greater than happiness in the world, and 
that is holiness ; and it is not in our keeping ; 
but what God has put in our power is the hap- 
piness of those about us, and that is largely to 
be secured by our being kind to them. 

4 'The greatest thing," says some one, "a 
man can do for his Heavenly Father is to be 
kind to some of His other children. ' ■ I wonder 
why it is that we are not all kinder than we 
are? How much the world needs it. How 
easily it is done. How instantaneously it acts. 
How infallibly it is remembered. How super- 
abundantly it pays itself back — for there is no 
debtor in the world so honorable, so superbly 
honorable, as Love. "Love never faileth. " 
Love is success, Love is happiness, Love is 
life. "Love I say," with Browning, "is energy 
of Life." 



"For life, with all it yields of joy or woe 
And hope and fear, 

Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love, — 
How love might be, hath been, indeed, and is." 



16 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

Where Love is, God is. He that dwelleth in 
Love dwelleth in God. God is Love. There- 
fore love. Without distinction, without calcu- 
lation, without procrastination, love. Lavish 
it upon the poor, where it is very easy ; espe- 
cially upon the rich, who often need it most ; 
most of all upon our equals, where it is very 
difficult, and for whom perhaps we each do 
least of all. There is a difference between try- 
ing to please and giving pleasure. Give pleas- 
ure. Lose no chance of giving pleasure. For 
that is the ceaseless and anonymous triumph 
of a truly loving spirit. "I shall pass through 
this world but once. Any good thing therefore 
that I can do, or any kindness that I can show 
to any human being, let me do it now. Let 
me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not 
pass this way again. " 

Generosity. "Love envieth not." This is 
love in competition with others. Whenever 
you attempt a good work you will find other 
men doing the same kind of work, and prob- 
ably doing it better. Envy them not. Envy 
is a feeling of ill-will to those who are in the 
same line as ourselves, a spirit of covetousness 
and detraction. How little Christian work 
even is a protection against un-Christian feel- 
ing. That most despicable of all the unworthy 
m jds which cloud a Christian's soul assuredly 
waits for us on the threshold of every work, 
unless we are fortified with this grace of mag- 
nanimity. Only one thing truly need the 
Christian envy, the large, rich, generous soul 
which " envieth not. " 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 17 

And, then, after having learned all that, you 
have to learn this further thing, Humility — to 
put a seal upon your lips and forget what you 
have done. After you have been kind, after 
Love has stolen forth into the world and done 
its beautiful work, go back into the shade 
again and say nothing about it. Love hides 
even from itself. Love waives even self-satis- 
faction. "Love vaunteth not itself, is not 
puffed up. " 

The fifth ingredient is a somewhat strange 
one to find in this summum bonum : Courtesy. 
This is Love in society, Love in relation to 
etiquette. "Love does not behave itself un- 
seemly. " Politeness has been defined as love 
in trifles. Courtesy is said to be love in little 
things. And the one secret of politeness is to 
love. Love cannot behave itself unseemly. 
You can put the most untutored persons into 
the highest society, and if they have a reser- 
voir of Love in their heart they will not behave 
themselves unseemly. They simply cannot 
do it. Carlisle said of Robert Burns that there 
was no truer gentleman in Europe than the 
ploughman-poet. It was because he loved 
everything — the mouse, and the daisy, and all 
the things, great and small, that God had 
made. So with this simple passport he could 
mingle with any society, and enter courts and 
palaces from his little cottage on the banks of 
the Ayr. You know the meaning of the word 
"gentleman. " It means a gentle man — a man 
who does things gently with love. And that 
is the whole art and mystery of it. The gen- 

2 Drummond 



18 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

tie man cannot in the nature of things do an 
ungentle, an ungentlemanly thing. The 
ungentle soul, the inconsiderate, unsympa- 
thetic nature, cannot do anything else. "Love 
doth not behave itself unseemly." 

Unselfishness. "Love seeketh not her own." 
Observe: Seeketh not even that which is 
her own. In Britain the Englishman is de- 
voted, and rightly, to his rights. But there 
come times when a man may exercise even 
the higher right of giving up his rights. Yet 
Paul does not summon us to give up our 
rights. Love strikes much deeper. It would 
have us not seek them at all, ignore them 
eliminate the personal element altogether 
from our calculations. It is not hard to give 
up our rights. They are often eternal. The 
difficult thing is to give up ourselves. The 
more difficult thing still is not to seek things 
for ourselves at all. After we have sought 
them, bought them, won them, deserved them, 
we have taken the cream off them for our- 
selves already. Little cross then to give them 
up. But not to seek them, to look every man 
not on his own things, but on the things of 
others — id opus est "Seekest thou great things 
for thyself," said the prophet; "seek them 
not. " Why? Because there is no greatness in 
things. Things cannot be great. The only 
greatness is unselfish love. Even self-denial in 
itself is nothing, is almost a mistake. Only a 
great purpose or a mightier love can justify 
the waste. It is more difficult, I have said, 
not to seek our own at all, than, having sought 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 19 

it, to give it up. I must take that back. It is 
only true of a partly selfish heart. Nothing is 
a hardship to Love, and nothing is hard. I 
believe that Christ's "yoke" is easy. Christ's 
yoke is just his way of taking life. And I be- 
lieve it is an easier way than any other. I 
believe it is' a happier way than any other. 
The most obvious lesson in Christ's teaching 
is that there is no happiness in having and 
getting anything, but only in giving. I repeat, 
there is no happiness in having or in getting, 
but only in giving. And half the world is on 
the wrong scent in pursuit of happiness. They 
think it consists in having and getting, and in 
being served by others. It consists in giving, 
and in serving others. He that would be great 
among you, said Christ, let him serve. He 
that would be happy, let him remember that 
there is but one way — it is more blessed, it is 
more happy, to give than to receive. 

The next ingredient is a very remarkable 
one: Good temper. " Love is not easily pro- 
voked." Nothing could be more striking than 
to find this here. We are inclined to look upon 
bad temper as a very harmless weakness. We 
speak of it as a mere infirmity of nature, a 
family failing, a matter of temperament, not 
a thing to take into very serious account in 
estimating a man's character. And yet here, 
right in the heart of this analysis of love, it 
finds a place; and the Bible again and again 
returns to condemn it as one of the most de- 
structive elements in human nature. 

The peculiarity of ill temper is that it is the 



20 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

vice of the virtuous. It is often the one blot 
on an otherwise noble character. You know 
men who are all but perfect, and women who 
would be entirely perfect, but for an easily 
ruffled, quick-tempered, or "touchy" disposi- 
tion. This compatibility of ill temper with 
high moral character is one of the strangest 
and saddest problems of ethics. The truth is 
there are two great classes of sins — sins of the 
Body, and sins of the Disposition. The Prod- 
igal Son may be taken as a type of the first, 
the Elder Brother of the second. Now, society 
has no doubt whatever as to which of these is 
the worse. Its brand falls, without a challenge, 
upon the Prodigal. But are we right? We 
have no balance to weigh one another's sins, 
and coarser and finer are but human words ; 
but faults in the higher nature may be less 
venial than those in the lower, and to the eye 
of Him who is Love, a sin against Love may 
seem a hundred times more base. No form of 
vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not 
drunkenness itself, does more to un- Christian- 
ize society than evil temper. For embittering 
life, for breaking up communities, for destroy- 
ing the most sacred relationships, for devastat- 
ing homes, for withering up men and women 
for taking the bloom of childhood, in short, for 
sheer gratuitous misery- producing power, this 
influence stands alone. Look at the Elder 
Brother, moral, hard-working, patient, dutiful 
— let him get all credit for his virtues — look 
at this man, this baby, sulking outside his own 
father's door. "He was angry," we read, 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 21 

'" and would not go in." Look at the effect 
upon the father, upon the servants, upon the 
happiness of the guests. Judge of the effect 
upon the Prodigal — and how many prodigals 
are kept out of the Kingdom of God by the 
unlovely character of those who profess to be 
inside? Analyze, as a study in Temper, the 
thunder-cloud itself as it gathers upon the 
Elder Brother's brow. What is it made of? 
Jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty, self- 
righteousness, touchiness, doggedness, sullen- 
ness — these are the ingredients of this dark 
and loveless soul. In varying proportions, 
also, these are the ingredients of all ill temper. 
Judge if such sins of the disposition are not 
worse to live in, and for others to live with, 
than sins of the body. Did Christ, indeed, 
not answer the question Himself when He 
said, "I say unto you, that the publicans and 
the harlots go into the Kingdom of Heaven 
before you. " There is really no place in 
Heaven for a disposition like this. A man 
with such a mood could only make Heaven 
miserable for all the people in it. Except, 
therefore, such a man be born again, he can- 
not, he simply cannot, enter the Kingdom of 
Heaven. For it is perfectly certain — and you 
will not misunderstand me — that to enter 
Heaven a man must take it with him. 

You will see then why Temper is significant. 
It is not in what it is alone, but in what it re- 
veals. This is why I take the liberty now of 
speaking of it with such unusual plainness. It 
is a test for love, a symptom, a revelation of 



22 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

an unloving nature at bottom. It is the inter- 
mittent fever which bespeaks unintermittent 
disease within; the occasional bubble escaping 
to the surface which betrays some rottenness 
underneath ; a sample of the most hidden pro- 
ducts of the soul dropped involuntarily when 
off one's guard; in a word, the lightning form 
of a hundred hideous and un-Christian sins. 
For a want of patience, a want of kindness, a 
want of generosity, a want of courtesy, a want 
of unselfishness, are all instantaneously sym- 
bolized in one flash of Temper. 

Hence it is not enough to deal with the 
Temper. We must go to the source, and', 
change the inmost nature, and the angry 
humors will die away of themselves. Souls 
are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids, 
out, but by putting something in — a great 
Love, a new Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Christ, 
the Spirit of Christ, interpenetrating ours, 
sweetens, purifies, transforms all. This only 
can eradicate what is wrong, work a chemical 
change, renovate and regenerate, and rehabili- 
tate the inner man. Will-power does not 
change men. Time does not change men. 
Christ does. Therefore "Let that mind be in 
you which was also in Christ Jesus. " Some 
of us have not much time to lose. Remem- 
ber, once more, that this is a matter of life or 
death. I cannot help speaking urgently, for 
myself, for yourselves. " Whoso shall offend 
one of these little ones, which believe in me, 
it were better for him that a millstone were 
hanged about his neck, and that he were 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 23 

drowned in the depth of the sea." That is 
to say, it is the deliberate verdict of the Lord 
Jesus that it is better not to live than not to 
love. It is better not to live than not to love. 

Guilelessness and Sincerity may be dismissed 
almost without a word. Guilelessness is the 
grace for suspicious people. And the posses- 
sion of it is the great secret of personal influ- 
ence. You will find, if you think for a mo- 
ment, that the people who influence you are 
people who believe in you. In an atmosphere 
of suspicion men shrivel up ; but in that atmos- 
phere they expand, and find encouragement 
and educative fellowship. It is a wonderful 
thing that here and there in this hard, un- 
charitable world there should still be left a few 
rare souls who think no evil. This is the 
great unworldliness. Love 4 4 thinketh no evil, ' ' 
imputes no motive, sees the bright side, puts 
the best construction on every action. What 
a delightful state of mind to live in! What a 
stimulus and benediction even to meet with it 
for a day! To be trusted is to be saved. 
And if we try to influence or elevate others, 
we shall soon see that success is in proportion 
to their belief of our belief in them. For the 
respect of another is the first restoration of the 
self-respect a man has lost ; our ideal of what 
he is becomes to him the hope and pattern of 
what he may become. 

4 'Love rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoice th 
in the truth.'* I have called this Sincerity 
from the words rendered in the Authorized 
Version by "rejoiceth in the truth." And, 



24 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

certainly, were this the real translation, noth- 
ing - could be more just. For he who loves will 
love Truth not less than men. He will rejoice 
in the Truth — rejoice not in what he has been 
taught to believe; not in this Church's doc- 
trine or in that ; not in this ism or in that ism ; 
but "in the Truth." He will accept only 
what is real ; he will strive to get at facts ; he 
will search for Truth with a humble and un- 
biased mind, and cherish whatever he finds at 
any sacrifice. But the more literal translation 
of the Revised Version calls for just such a 
sacrifice for truth's sake here. For what Paul 
really meant is, as we there read, "Rejoiceth 
not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the 
truth," a quality which probably no one Eng- 
lish word — and certainly not Sincerity — ade- 
quately defines. It includes, perhaps more 
strictly, the self-restraint which refuses to 
make capital out of others' faults ; the charity 
which delights not in exposing the weakness 
of others, but "covereth all things;" the sin- 
cerity of purpose which endeavors to see things 
as they are, and rejoices to find them better 
than suspicion feared or calumny denounced. 
So much for the analysis of Love. Now the 
business of our lives is to have these things 
fitted into our characters. This is the supreme 
work to which we need to address ourselves in 
this world, to learn Love. Is life not full of 
opportunities for learning Love? Every man 
and woman every day as a thousand of them. 
The world is not a playground ; it is a school- 
room. Life is not a holiday, but an education. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 25 

And the one eternal lesson for us all is how 
better we can love. What makes a man a 
good cricketer? Practice. What makes a man 
a good artist, a good sculptor, a good musi- 
cian? Practice. What makes a man a good 
linguist, a good stenographer? Practice. 
What makes a man a good man? Practice. 
Nothing else. There is nothing capricious 
about religion. We do not get the soul in 
different ways, under different laws, from 
those in which we get the body and the mind. 
If a man does not exercise his arm he develops 
no biceps muscle ; and if a man does not exer- 
cise his soul, he acquires no muscle in his soul, 
no strength of character, no vigor of moral 
fibre, nor beauty of spiritual growth. Love is 
not a thing of enthusiastic emotion. It is a 
rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression of the 
whole round Christian character-— the Christ- 
like nature in its fullest development. And 
the constituents of this great character are 
only to be built up by ceaseless practice. 

What was Christ doing in the carpenter's 
shop? Practicing. Though perfect, we read 
that He learned obedience, and grew in wis- 
dom and in favor with God. Do not quarrel 
therefore with your lot in life. Do not com- 
plain of its never-ceasing cares, its petty en- 
vironment, the vexations you have to stand, 
the small and sordid souls you have to live and 
work with. Above all, do not resent tempta- 
tion ; do not be perplexed because it seems to 
thicken round you more and more, and ceases 
neither for effort nor for agony nor prayer. 



26 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

That is your practice. That is the practice 
which God appoints you; and it is having its 
work in making you patient, and humble, and 
generous, and unselfish, and kind, and courte- 
ous. Do not grudge the hand that is mould- 
ing the still too shapeless image within you. It 
is growing more beautiful, though you see it 
not, and every touch of temptation may add 
to its perfection. Therefore keep in the 
midst of life. Do not isolate yourself. Be 
among men, and among things, and among 
troubles, and difficulties, and obstacles. You 
remember Goethe's words: Es bildet ein 
Talent sick in der Stille, Dock ein Charakter 
in dern Strom der Welt. 44 Talent develops 
itself in solitude; character in the stream of 
life." Talent develops itself in solitude — the 
talent of prayer, of faith, of meditation, of 
seeing the unseen; character grows in the 
stream of the world's life. That chiefly is 
where men are to learn love. 

How? Now, how? To make it easier, I 
have named a few of the elements of love. 
But these are only elements. Love itself can 
never be defined. Light is a something more 
than the sum of its ingredients — a glowing, 
dazzling, tremulous ether. And love is some- 
thing more than all its elements — a palpitat- 
ing, quivering, sensitive, living thing. By 
synthesis of all the colors, men can make 
whiteness, they cannot make light. By syn- 
thesis of all the virtues, men can make virtue, 
they cannot make love. How then are we to 
have this transcendent living whole conveyed 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 27 

into our souls? We brace our wills to secure 
it. We try to copy those who have it. We 
lay down rules about it. We watch. We 
pray. But these things alone will not bring 
love into our nature. Love is an effect. And 
only as we fulfill the right condition can we 
have the effect produced. Shall I tell you 
what the cause is? 

If you turn to the Revised Version of the 
First Epistle of John you will find these 
words: "We love because He first loved us." 
44 We love," not "We love Him." That is the 
way the old version has it, and it is quite 
wrong. u We love — because He first loved 
us." Look at the word "because." It is the 
cause of which I have spoken. " Because He 
first loved us, ' ' the effect follows that we love, 
we love Him, we love all men. We cannot 
help it. Because He loved us, we love, we 
love everybody. Our heart is slowly 
changed. Contemplate the love of Christ, 
and you will love. Stand before that mirror, 
reflect Christ's character, and you will be 
changed into the same image from tenderness 
to tenderness. There is no other way. You 
cannot love to order. You can onty look at 
the lovely object, and fall in love with it, and 
grow into likeness to it. And so look at this 
Perfect Character, this Perfect Life. Look at 
the great Sacrifice as He laid down Himself, all 
through life, and upon the Cross of Calvary; 
and you must love Him. And loving Him, 
you must become like Him. Love begets 
love. It is a process of induction. Put a 



28 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

piece of iron in the presence of an electrified 
body, and that piece of iron for a time becomes 
electrified. It is changed into a temporary- 
magnet in the mere presence of a permanent 
magnet, and as long as you leave the two side 
by side, they are both magnets alike. Remain 
side by side with Him who loved us, and gave 
Himself for us, and you too will become a per- 
manent magnet, a permanently attractive 
force; and like Him you will draw all men 
unto you, like Him you will be drawn unto all 
men. This is the inevitable effect of Love. 
Any man who fulfills that cause must have 
that effect produced in him. Try to give up 
the idea that religion comes to us by chance, 
or by mystery, or by caprice. It comes to us 
by natural law, or by supernatural law, for all 
law is Divine. Edward Irving went to see a 
dying boy once, and when he entered the room 
he just put his hand on the sufferer's head, and 
said, "My boy, God loves you," and went 
away. And the boy started from his bed, and 
called out to the people in the house, "God 
loves me! God loves me!" It changed that 
boy. The sense that God loved him over- 
powered him, melted him down, and began 
the creating of a new heart in him. And that 
is how the love of God melts down the un- 
lovely heart in man, and begets in him the 
new creature, who is patient and humble and 
gentle and unselfish. And there is no other 
way to get it. There is no mystery about it. 
We love others, we love everybody, we love 
our enemies, because He first loved us. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 29 



THE DEFENCE. 

Now I have a closing sentence or two to add 
about Paul's reason for singling out love as 
the supreme possession. It is a very remark- 
able reason. In a single word it is this : it 
lasts. "Love," urges Paul, "never faileth. ,, 
Then he begins again one of his marvelous 
lists of the great things of the day, and exposes 
them one by one. He runs over the things 
that men thought were going to last, and 
shows that they are all fleeting, temporary, 
passing away. 

"Whether there be prophecies, they shall 
fail." It was the mother's ambition for her 
boy in those days that he should become a 
prophet. For hundreds of years God had 
never spoken by means of any prophet, and at 
that time the prophet was greater than the 
King. Men waited wistfully for another mes- 
senger to come, and hung upon his lips when 
he appeared as upon the very voice of God. 
Paul says, "Whether there be prophecies, they 
shall fail." This book is full of prophecies. 
One by one they have "failed;" that is, having 
been fulfilled their work is finished; they have 
nothing more to do now in the world except to 
feed a devout man's faith. 

Then Paul talks about tongues. That was 



30 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

another thing that was greatly coveted. 
"Whether there be tongues, they shall cease." 
As we all know, many, many centuries have 
passed since tongues have been known in this 
world. They have ceased. Take it in any 
sense you like. Take it, for illustration 
merely, as languages in general — a sense 
which was not in Paul's mind at all, and which 
though it cannot give us the specific lesson 
will poirut the general truth. Consider the 
words in which these chapters were written — 
Greek. It has gone. Take the Latin — the 
other great tongue of those days. It ceased 
long ago. Look at the Indian language. It is 
ceasing. The language of Wales, of Ireland, 
of the Scottish Highlands is dying before our 
eyes. The most popular book in the English 
tongue at the present time, except the Bible, 
is % one of Dickens' works, his "Pickwick 
Papers. " It is largely written in the language 
of London street-life ; and experts assure us 
that in fifty years it will be unintelligible to 
the average English reader. 

Then Paul goes farther, and with even 
greater boldness adds, "Whether there be 
knowledge, it shall vanish away." The wis- 
dom of the ancients, where is it? It is wholly 
gone. A schoolboy of to-day knows more than 
Sir Isaac Newton knew. His knowledge has 
vanished away. You put yesterday's news- 
paper in the fire. Its knowledge has vanished 
away. You buy the old editions of the great 
encyclopaedias for a few pence. Their knowl- 
edge has vanished away. Look how the 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 31 

coach has been superseded by the use of steam. 
Look how electricity has superseded that, and 
swept a hundred almost new inventions into 
oblivion. One of the greatest living authori- 
ties, Sir William Thompson, said the other 
day, "The steam-engine is passing away." 
* 'Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish 
away." At every workshop you will see, in 
the back yard, a heap of old iron, a few wheels, 
a few levers, a few cranks, broken and eaten 
with rust. Twenty years ago that was the 
pride of the city. Men flocked in from the 
country to see the great invention ; now it is 
superseded, its day is done. And all the 
boasted science and philosophy of this day will 
soon be old. But yesterday, in the University 
of Edinburgh, the greatest figure in the faculty 
was Sir James Simpson, the discoverer of 
chloroform. The other day his successor and 
nephew, Professor Simpson, was asked by the 
librarian of the University to go to the library 
and pick out the books on his subject that were 
no longer needed. And his reply to the libra- 
rian was this: "Take every text-book that is 
more than ten years old, and put it down in 
the cellar." Sir James Simpson was a great 
authority only a few years ago: men came 
from all parts of the earth to consult him ; and 
almost the whole teaching of that time is con- 
signed by the science of to-day to oblivion. 
And in every branch of science it is the same. 
"Now we know in part. We see through a 
glass darkly." 

Can you tell me anything that is going to 



32 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

last? Many things Paul did not condescend to 
name. He did not mention money, fortune, 
fame ; but he picked out the great things of his 
time, the things the best men thought had 
something in them, and brushed them per- 
emptorily aside. Paul had no charge against 
these things in themselves. All he said about 
them was that they would not last. They 
were great things, but not supreme things. 
There were things beyond them. What we 
are stretches past what we do, beyond what 
we possess. Many things that men denounce 
as sins are not sins ; but they are temporary. 
And that is a favorite argument of the New 
Testament. John says of the world, not 
that it is wrong, but simply that it "pass- 
eth away. " There is a great deal in the 
world that is delightful and beautiful ; there is 
a great deal in it that is great and engrossing; 
but it will not last. All that is in the world, 
the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and 
the pride of life, are but for a little while. 
Love not the world therefore. Nothing that 
it contains is worth the life and consecration 
of an immortal soul. The immortal soul must 
give itself to something that is immortal. And 
the only immortal things are these: "Now 
abideth faith, hope, love, but the greatest of 
these is love. " 

Some think the time may come when two of 
these three things will also pass away — faith 
into sight, hope into fruition. Paul does not 
say so. We know but little now about the 
conditions of the life that is to come. But 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 33 

what is certain is that Love must last. God, 
the Eternal God, is Love. Covet therefore 
that everlasting gift, that one thing which it is 
certain is going to stand, that one coinage 
which will be current in the Universe when 
all the other coinages of all the nations of the 
world shall be useless and unhonored. You 
will give yourselves to many things, give your- 
self first to Love. Hold things in their pro- 
portion. Hold things in their proportion. 
Let at least the first great object of our lives 
be to achieve the character defended in these 
words, the character — and it is the character 
of Christ — which is built round Love. 

I have said this thing is eternal. Did you 
ever notice how continually John associates 
love and faith with eternal life? I was not 
told when I was a boy that "God so loved the 
world that He gave His only-begotten Son, 
that whosoever believeth in Him should have 
everlasting life." What I was told, I remem- 
ber, was, that God so loved the world that, if 
I trusted in Him, I was to have a thing called 
peace, or I was to have rest, or I was to have 
joy, or I was to have safety. But I had to find 
out for myself that whosoever trusteth in Him 
— that is, whosoever loveth Him, for trust is 
only the avenue to Love — hath everlasting 
life. The Gospel offers a man life. Never 
offer men a thimbleful of Gospel. Do not offer 
them merely joy, or merely peace, or merely 
rest, or merely safety; tell them how Christ 
came to give men a more abundant life than 
they have, a life abundant in love, and there- 

3 Drummond 



34 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

fore abundant in salvation for themselves, and 
large in enterprise for the alleviation and 
redemption of the world. Then only can the 
Gospel take hold of the whole of a man, body, 
soul, and spirit, and give to each part of his 
nature its exercise and reward. Many of the 
current Gospels are addressed only to a part of 
man's nature. They offer peace, not life; 
faith, not Love ; justification, not regeneration. 
And men slip back again from such religion 
because it has never* really held them. Their 
nature was not all in it. It offered no deeper 
and gladder life-current than the life that was 
lived before. Surely it stands to reason that 
only a fuller love can compete with the love of 
the world. 

To love abundantly is to live abundantly, 
and to love forever is to live forever. Hence, 
eternal life is inextricably bound up with love. 
We want to live forever for the same reason 
that we want to live to-morrow. Why do you 
want to live to-morrow? It is because there is 
some one who loves you, and whom you want 
to see to-morrow, and be with, and love back. 
There is no other reason whjT- we should live 
on than that we love and are loved. It is when 
a man has no one to love him that he commits 
suicide. So long as he has friends, those who 
love him and whom he loves, he will live, 
because to live is to love. Be it but the love 
of a dog, it will keep him in life ; but let that 
go and he has no contact with life, no reason 
to live. He dies by his own hand. Eternal 
life also is to know God, and God is love. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 35 

This is Christ's own definition. Ponder it. 
"This is life eternal, that they might know 
Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom 
Thou has sent/' Love must be eternal. It 
is what God is. On the last analysis, then, 
love is life. Love never faileth, and live never 
faileth, so long as there is love. That is the 
philosophy of what Paul is showing us; the 
reason why in the nature of things Love should 
be the supreme thing — because it is going to 
last; because in the nature of things it is an 
Eternal Life. It is a thing that we are living 
now, not that we get when we die ; that we 
shall have a poor chance of getting when we 
die unless we are living now. No worse fate 
can befall a man in this world than to live and 
grow old alone, unloving, and unloved. To 
be lost is to live in an unregenerate condition, 
loveless and unloved; and to be saved is to 
love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth 
already in God. For God is Love. 

Now I have all but finished. How many of 
you will join me in reading this chapter once 
a week for the next three months? A man did 
that once and it changed his whole life. Will 
you do it? It is for the greatest thing in the 
world. You might begin by reading it every 
day, especially the verses which describe the 
perfect character. "Love suffereth long, and 
is kind ; love envieth not ; love vaunteth not 
itself. " Get these ingredients into your life. 
Then everything that you do is eternal. It is 
worth doing. It is worth giving time to. No 
man can become a saint in his sleep : and to 



36 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

fulfill the condition required demands a certain 
amount of prayer and meditation and time, 
just as improvement in any direction, bodily 
or mental, requires preparation and care. 
Address yourselves to that one thing ; at any 
cost have this transcendent character ex- 
changed for yours. You will find as you look 
back upon your life that the moments that 
stand out, the moments when you have really 
lived, are the moments when you have done 
things in a spirit of love. As memory scans 
the past, above and beyond all the transitory 
pleasures of life, there leap forward those 
supreme hours when yon have been enabled 
to do unnoticed kindnesses to those round 
about you, things too trifling to speak about, 
but which you feel have entered into your 
eternal life. I have seen almost all the 
beautiful things God has made; I have enjoyed 
almost every pleasure that he has planned for 
man; and yet as I look back I see standing 
out above all the life that has gone four or five 
short experiences when the love of God 
reflected itself in some poor imitation, some 
small act of love of mine, and these seem to 
be the things which alone of all one's life 
abide. Everything else in all our lives is 
transitory. Every other good is visionary. 
But the acts of love which no man knows 
about, or can ever know about — they never 
fail. 

In the Book of Matthew, where the Judg- 
ment Day is depicted for us in the imagery 
of One seated upon a throne and dividing the 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 37 

sheep from the goats, the test of a man then is 
not, "How have I believed?" but "How have 
I loved ?" The test of religion, the final test 
of religion, is not religiousness, but Love. I 
say the final test of religion at that great Day 
is not religiousness, but Love ; not what I have 
done, not what I have believed, not what I 
have achieved, but how I have discharged the 
common charities of life. Sins of commission 
in that awful indictment are not even referred 
to. By what we have not done, by sins of 
omission, we are judged. It could not be 
otherwise. For the withholding of love is the 
negation of the spirit of Christ, the proof that 
we never knew Him, that for us He lived in 
vain. It means that He suggested nothing in 
all our thoughts, that He inspired nothing in 
all our lives, that we were not once near enough 
to Him to be seized with the spell of His com- 
passion for the world. It means that — 

"I lived for myself, I thought for myself, 
For myself, and none beside — 
Just as if Jesus had never lived, 
As if He had never died." 

It is the Son of Man before whom the nations 
of the world shall be gathered. It is in the 
presence of Humanity that we shall be charged. 
And the spectacle itself, the mere sight of it, 
will silently judge each one. Those will be 
there whom we have met and helped ; or there, 
the unpitied multitude whom we neglected or 
despised. No other witness need be sum- 
moned. No other charge than lovelessness 



38 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

shall be preferred. Be not deceived. The 
words which all of us shall one Day hear sound 
not of theology but of life, not of churches and 
saints but of the hungry and the poor, not of 
creeds and doctrines but of shelter and cloth- 
ing, not of Bibles and prayer-books but of cups 
of cold water in the name of Christ. Thank 
God the Christianity of to-day is coming nearer 
the world's need. Live to help that on. 
Thank God men know better, by a hairsbreadth, 
what religion is, what God is, who Christ is, 
where Christ is. Who is Christ? He who 
fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the 
sick. And where is Christ? Where? — whoso 
shall receive a little child in My name receiveth 
Me. And who are Christ's? Every one that 
loveth is born of God. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 39 



PAX VOBISCUM. 



I heard the other morning a sermon by a 
distinguished preacher upon "Rest. " It was 
full of beautiful thoughts ; but when I came 
to ask myself, "How does he say I can get 
Rest?" there was no answer. The sermon 
was sincerely meant to be practical, yet it con- 
tained no experience that seemed to me to be 
tangible, nor any advice which could help me 
to find the thing itself as I went about the 
world that afternoon. Yet this omission of the 
only important problem was not the fault of 
the preacher The whole popular religion is in 
the twilight here. And when pressed for 
really working specifics for the experiences 
with which it deals, it falters, and seems to 
lose itself in mist. 

The want of connection between the great 
words of religion and every-day life has bewild- 
ered and discouraged all of us. Christianity 
possesses the noblest words in the language; 
its literature overflows with terms expressive 
of the greatest and happiest moods which can 
fill the soul of man. Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith, 
Love, Light — these words occur with such per- 
sistency in hymns and prayers that an observer 
might think they formed the staple of Chris- 



40 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

tian experience. But on coming to close quar- 
ters with the actual life of most of us, how 
surely would he be disenchanted! I do not 
think we ourselves are aware how much our 
religious life is made up of phrases ; how much 
of what we call Christian experience is only a 
dialect of the Churches, a mere religious 
phraseology with almost nothing behind it in 
what we really feel and know. 

To some of us, indeed, the Christian expe- 
riences seem further away than when we took 
the first steps in the Christian life. That life 
has not opened out as we had hoped ; we do 
not regret our religion, but we are disappointed 
with it. There are times, perhaps, when wan- 
dering notes from a diviner music stray into 
our spirits ; but these experiences come at few 
and fitful moments. We have no sense of 
possession in them. When they visit us, it 
is a surprise. When they leave us, it is 
without explanation. When we wish their 
return, we do not know how to secure it. 

AH which points to a religion without solid 
base, and a poor and flickering life. It means 
a great bankruptcy in those experiences which 
give Christianity its personal solace and make 
it attractive to the world, and a great uncer- 
tainty as to any remedy. It is as if we knew 
everything about health — except the way to 
get it. 

I am quite sure that the difficulty does not 
lie in the fact that men are not in earnest. 
This is simply not the fact. All around us 
Christians are wearing themselves out in trying 




" A sermon by a distinguished prencher."— Page 39. 

Drummond's Addresses. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 41 

to be better. The amount of spiritual longing 
in the world — in the hearts of unnumbered 
thousands of men and women in whom we 
should never suspect it; among the wise and 
thoughtful; among the young and gay, who 
seldom assuage and never betray their thirst — 
this is one of the most wonderful and touching 
facts of life. It is not more heat that is needed, 
but more light; not more force, but a wiser 
direction to be given to very real energies 
already there. 

The Address which follows is offered as an 
humble contribution to this problem, and in 
the hope that it may help some who are " seek- 
ing Rest and finding none" to a firmer footing 
on one great, solid, simple principle which 
underlies not the Christian experiences alone, 
but all experiences, and all life. 

What Christian experience wants is thread, 
a vertebral column, method. It is impossible 
to believe that there is no remedy for its un- 
evenness and dishevelment, or that the remedy 
is a secret. The idea, also, that some few 
men, by happy chance or happier temperament, 
have been given the secret — as if there were 
some sort of knack or trick of it — is wholly 
incredible. Religion must ripen its fruit for 
every temperament; and the way even into 
its highest heights must be by a gateway 
through which the peoples of the world may 
pass. 

I shall try to lead up to this gateway by a 
very familiar path. But as that path is 



42 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

strangely unfrequented, and even unknown, 
where it passes into the religious sphere, I 
must dwell for a moment on the commonest of 
commonplaces. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 43 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 

Nothing that happens in the world happens 
by chance. God is a God of order. Every- 
thing is arranged upon definite principles, and 
never at random. The world, even the relig- 
ious world, is governed by law, Character is 
governed by law. Happiness is governed by 
law. The Christian experiences are governed 
by law. Men, forgetting this, expect Rest, 
Joy, Peace, Faith to drop into their souls from 
the air like snow or rain. But in point of fact 
they do not do so ; and if they did they would 
no less have their origin in previous activities 
and be controlled by natural laws. Rain and 
snow do drop from the air, but not without a 
long previous history. They are the mature 
effects of former causes. Equally so are Rest, 
and Peace, and Joy. They, too, have each a 
previous history. Storms and winds and calms 
are not accidents, but are brought about by 
antecedent circumstances. Rest and Peace 
are but calms in man's inward nature, and 
arise through causes as definite and as inevit- 
able. 

Realize it thoroughly: it is a methodical not 
an accidental world. If a housewife turns out 
a good cake, it is the result of a sound receipt, 
carefully applied. She cannot mix the assigned 



44 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

ingredients and fire them for the appropriate 
time without producing the result. It is not 
she who has made the cake ; it is nature. She 
brings related things together; sets causes at 
work ; these causes bring about the result. She 
is not a creator, but an intermediary. She 
does not expect random causes to produce spe- 
cific effects — random ingredients would only- 
produce random cakes. So it is in the making 
of Christian experiences. Certain lines are 
followed ; certain effects are the result. These 
effects cannot but be the result. But the 
result can never take place without the previ- 
ous cause. To expect results without antece- 
dents is to expect cakes without ingredients. 
That impossibility is precisely the almost uni- 
versal expectation. 

Now what I mainly wish to do is to help you 
firmly to grasp this simple principle of Cause 
and Effect in the spiritual world. And 
instead of applying the principle generally to 
each of the Christian experiences in turn, I 
shall examine its application to one in some 
little detail. The one I shall select is Rest. 
And I think any one who follows the applica- 
tion in this single instance will be able to apply 
it for himself to all the others. 

Take such a sentence as this: African ex- 
plorers are subject to fevers which cause rest- 
lessness and delirium. Note the expression, 
44 cause restlessness. " Restlessness has a cause. 
Clearly then, any one who wished to get rid 
of restlessness would proceed at once to deal 
with the cause. If that were not removed, a 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 45 

doctor might prescribe a hundred things, and 
all might be taken in turn, without producing 
the least effect. Things are so arranged in 
the original planning of the world that certain 
effects n?.ust follow certain causes, and certain 
causes must be abolished before certain effects 
can be removed. Certain parts of Africa are 
inseparably linked with the physical expe- 
rience called fever; this fever is in turn infal- 
libly linked with a mental experience called 
restlessness and delirium. To abolish the 
mental experience the radical method would 
be to abolish the physical experience, and the 
way of abolishing the physical experience 
would be to abolish Africa, or to cease to go 
there. Now this holds good for all other forms 
of Restlessness. Every other form and kind 
of Restlessness in the world has a definite 
cause, and the particular kind of Restlessness 
can only be removed by removing the allotted 
cause. 

All this is also true of Rest. Restlessness 
has a cause: must not Rest have a cause? 
Necessarily. If it were a chance world we 
would not expect this; but, being a method- 
ical world, it cannot be otherwise. Rest, phy- 
sical rest, moral rest, spiritual rest, every kind 
of rest, has a cause as certainly as restlessness. 
Now causes are discriminating. There is 
one kind of cause for every particular effect, 
and no other; and if one particular effect is 
desired, the corresponding cause must be set 
in motion. It is no use proposing finely 
devised schemes, or going through general 



46 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

pious exercises in the hope that somehow Rest 
will come. The Christian life is not casual, 
but causal. All nature is a standing protest 
against the absurdity of expecting to secure 
spiritual effects, or any effects, without the 
employment of appropriate causes. The Great 
Teacher dealt what ought to have been the 
final blow to this infinite irrelevancy by a 
single question, "Do men gather grapes of 
thorns or figs of thistles?' ' 

Why, then, did the Great Teacher not edu- 
cate His followers fully? Why did He not tell 
us, for example, how such a thing as Rest 
might be obtained? The answer is, that He 
did. But plainly, explicitly, in so many words? 
Yes, plainly, explicitly, in so many words. 
He assigned Rest to its cause, in words with 
which each of us has been familiar from his 
earliest childhood. 

He begins, you remember — for you at once 
know the passage I refer to — almost as if Rest 
could be had without any cause: "Come unto 
Me," He says, " and I will give you Rest." 

Rest, apparently, was a favor to be bestowed ; 
men had but to come to Him ; He would give 
it to every applicant. But the next sentence 
takes that all back. The qualification, indeed, 
~is added instantaneously. For what the first 
sentence seemed to give was next thing to an 
impossibility. For how, in a literal sense, can 
Rest be given? One could no more give away 
Rest than he could give away Laughter. We 
speak of "causing* ' laughter, which we can do; 
but we cannot give it away. When we speak 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 47 

of giving pain, we know perfectly well we can- 
not give pain away. And when we aim at giv- 
ing pleasure, all that we do is to arrange a set 
of circumstances in such a way as that these 
shall cause pleasure. Of course there is a sense, 
and a very wonderful sense, in which a Great 
Personality breathes upon all who come within 
its influence an abiding peace and trust. Men 
can be to other men as the shadow of a great 
rock in a thirsty land. Much more Christ; 
much more Christ as Perfect Man ; much more 
still as Savior of the world. But it is not this 
of which I speak. When Christ said He would 
give men rest, He meant simply that He would 
put them in the way of it. But no act of 
conveyance would, or could, He make over 
His own Rest to them. He could give them 
His receipt for it. That was all. But He would 
not make it for them; for one thing, it was not 
in His plan to make it for them; for another 
thing, men were not so planned that it could 
be made for them ; and for yet another thing, 
it was a thousand times better that they should 
make it for themselves. 

That this is the meaning becomes obvious 
from the wording of the second sentence: 
"Learn of Me and ye shall find Rest." Rest, 
that is to say, is not a thing that can be given, 
but a thing to be acquired. It comes not by 
an act, but by a process. It is not to be found 
in a happy hour, as one finds a treasure ; but 
slowly, as one finds knowledge. It could in- 
deed be no more found in a moment than could 
knowledge. A soil has to be prepared for it. 



48 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

Like a fine fruit, it will grow in one climate 
and not at another ; at one altitude and not at 
another. Like all growths it will have an 
orderly development and mature by slow 
degrees. 

The nature of this slow process Christ clearly 
defines when He says we are to achieve Rest 
by learning. " Learn of Me," He says, "and 
ye shall find Rest to your souls. ' ' Now con- 
sider the extraordinary originality of this utter- 
ance. How novel the connection between 
these two words, " Learn' ' and "Rest"! How 
few of us have ever associated them — ever 
thought that Rest was a thing to be learned ; 
ever laid ourselves out for it as we would to 
learn a language ; ever practiced it as we would 
practice the violin? Does it not show how 
entirely new Christ's teaching still is to the 
world, that so old and threadbare an aphorism 
should still be so little applied? The last thing 
most of us would have thought of would have 
been to associate Rest with Work. 

What must one work at? What is that which 
if duly learned will find the soul of man in 
Rest? Christ answers without the least hesi- 
tation. He specifies two things — Meekness 
and Lowliness. "Learn of Me," He says, 
"for I am meek and lowly in heart." Now, 
these two things are not chosen at random. To 
these accomplishments, in a special way, Rest 
is attached. Learn these, in short, and you 
have already found Rest. These as they stand 
are direct causes of Rest; will produce it at 
once ; cannot but produce it at once. And if 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 49 

you think for a single moment, you will see 
how this is necessarily so, for causes are never 
arbitrary, and the connection between antece- 
dent and consequent here and everywhere lies 
deep in the nature of things. 

What is the connection, then? I answer by 
a further question. What are the chief causes 
of Unrest? If you know yourself, you will 
answer Pride, Selfishness, Ambition. As you 
look back upon the past years of your life, is 
it not true that its unhappiness has chiefly 
come from the succession of personal mortifica- 
tions, and almost trivial disappointments which 
the intercourse of life has brought you? Great 
trials come at lengthened intervals, and we rise 
to breast them ; but it is the petty friction of 
our every-day life with one another, the jar of 
business or of work, the discord of the domestic 
circle, the collapse of our ambition, the cross- 
ing of our will or the taking down of our con- 
ceit, which make inward peace impossible. 
Wounded vanity, then, disappointed hopes, 
unsatisfied selfishness— these are the old, vul- 
gar, universal sources of man's unrest. 

Now it is obvious why Christ pointed out as 
the two chief objects for attainment the exact 
opposites of these. To Meekness and Lowli- 
ness these things simply do not exist. They 
cure unrest by making it impossible. These 
remedies do not trifle with surface symptoms ; 
they strike at once at removing causes. The 
ceaseless chagrin of a self-centered life can be 
removed at once by learning Meekness and 
Lowliness of heart. He who learns them is foi 

4 Drummond 



50 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

ever proof against it. He lives henceforth a 
charmed life. Christianity is a fine inocula- 
tion, a transfusion of healthy blood into an 
anaemic or poisoned soul. No fever can attack 
a perfectly sound body; no fever of unrest can 
disturb a soul which has breathed the air or 
learned the ways of Christ. Men sigh for the 
wings of a dove that they may fly away and 
be at rest. But flying away will not help us. 
4 'The Kingdom of God is within you." We 
aspire to the top to look for Rest ; it lies at the 
bottom. Water rests only when it gets to the 
lowest place. So do men. Hence, be lowly. 
The man who has no opinion of himself at all 
can never be hurt if others do not acknowl- 
edge him. Hence, be meek. He who is with- 
out expectation cannot fret if nothing comes to 
him. It is self-evident that these things are 
so. The lowly man and the meek man are 
really above all other men, above all other 
things. They dominate the world because they 
do not care for it. The miser does not possess 
gold, gold possesses him. But the meek pos- 
sess it. "The meek/' said Christ, "inherit the 
earth. " They do not buy it; they do not con- 
quer it ; but they inherit it. 

There are people who go about the world 
looking out for slights, and they are necessarily 
miserable, for they find them at every turn — • 
especially the imaginary ones. One has the 
same pity for such men as for the very poor. 
They are the morally illiterate. They have no 
real education, for the have learned how to 
live. Few men know how to live. We grow 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 51 

up at random, carrying into mature life the 
merely animal methods and motives which we 
had as little children. And it does not occur 
to us that all this must be changed ; that much 
of it must be revised ; that life is the finest of 
the Fine Arts; that it has to be learned with 
lifelong patience, and that the years of our 
pilgrimage are all too short to master it tri- 
umphantly. 

Yet this is what Christianity is for — to teach 
men the Art of Life. And its whole curri- 
culum lies in one word — " Learn of Men." 
Unlike most education, this is almost purely 
personal ; it is not to be had from books or lec- 
tures or creeds or doctrines. It is a study from 
the life. Christ never said much in mere 
words about the Christian Graces. He lived 
them, He was them. Yet we do not merely 
copy Him. We learn His art by living with 
Him, like the old apprentices with their 
masters. 

Now we understand it all? Christ's invita- 
tion to the weary and heavy-laden is a call to 
begin life over again upon a new principle — 
upon His own principle. " Watch My way of 
doing things," He says. "Follow Me. Take 
life as I take it. Be meek and lowly and you 
will find Rest." 

I do not say, remember, that the Christian 
life to every man, or to any man, can be a bed 
of roses. No educational process can be this. 
And perhaps if some men knew how 
much was involved in the simple "learn" of 
Christ, they would not enter His school with 



52 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

so irresponsible a heart. For there is not only 
much to learn, but much to unlearn. Many 
men never go to this school at all till their 
disposition is already half ruined and character 
has taken on its fatal set. To learn arithmetic 
is difficult at fifty— much more to learn Chris- 
tianity. To learn simply what it is to be meek 
and lowly, in the case of one who has had no 
lessons in that in childhood, may cost him half 
of what he values most on earth. Do we real- 
ize, for instance, that the way of teaching 
humility is generally by humiliation. There 
is probably no other school for it. When a 
man enters himself as a pupil in such a school 
it means a very great thing. There is such 
Rest there, but there is also much Work. 

I should be wrong, even though my theme 
is the brighter side, to ignore the cross and 
minimize the cost. Only it gives to the cross 
a more definite meaning, and a rarer value, to 
connect it thus directly and causally with the 
growth of the inner life. Our platitudes on the 
4 'benefits of affliction" are usually about as 
vague as our theories of Christian Experience. 
"Somehow/' we believe affliction does us good. 
But it is not a question of "Somehow. " The 
result is definite, calculable, necessary. It is 
under the strictest law of cause and effect. 
The first effect of losing one's fortune, for 
instance, is humiliation; and the effect of 
humiliation, as we have just seen, is to make 
one humble; and the effect of being humble is 
to produce Rest. It is a roundabout way, 
apparently, of producing Rest; but Nature 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 53 

generally works by circular processes; and it 
is not certain that there is any other way of 
becoming humble, or of finding Rest. If a 
man could make himself humble to order, it 
might simplify matters, but we do not find 
that this happens. Hence we must all go 
through the mill. Hence death, death to the 
lower self, is the nearest gate and the quickest 
road to life. 

Yet this is only half the truth. Christ's life 
outwardly was one of the most troubled lives 
that was ever lived. Tempest and tumult, 
tumult and tempest, the waves breaking over 
it all the time till the worn body was laid in 
the grave. But the inner life was a sea of 
glass. The great calm was always there. At 
any moment you might have gone to Him and 
found Rest. And even when the blood-hounds 
were dogging Him in the streets of Jerusalem, 
He turned to His disciples and offered them as 
a last legacy, "My peace. " Nothing ever for 
a moment broke the serenity of Christ's life on 
earth. Misfortune could not reach Him; He 
had no fortune. Food, raiment, money — 
fountain-heads of half the world's weariness — 
He simply did not care for; they played no 
part in His life; He "took no thought" for 
them. It was impossible to affect Him by 
lowering His reputation. He had already made 
Himself of no reputation. He was dumb before 
insult. When He was reviled He reviled not 
again. In fact, there was nothing that the 
world could do to Him that could ruffle the 
surface of His spirit. 



54 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

Such living, as merely living, is altogether 
unique. It is only when we see what it was 
in Him that we can know what the word Rest 
means. It lies not in emotions, nor in the 
absence of emotions. It is not a hallowed 
feeling that comes over us in church. It is not 
something that the preacher has in his voice. 
It is not in nature, or in poetry, or in music — 
though in all these there is soothing. It is the 
mind at leisure from itself. It is the perfect 
poise of the soul ; the absolute adjustment of 
the inward man to the stress of all outward 
things; the preparedness against every 
emergency; the stability of assured convic- 
tions; the eternal calm of an invulnerable 
faith; the repose of a heart set deep in God. 
It is the mood of the man who says, with 
Browning, "God's in His Heaven, all's well 
with the world. " 

Two painters each painted a picture to illus- 
trate his conception of rest. The first chose 
for his scene a still, lone lake among the far- 
off mountains. The second threw on his can- 
vas a thundering water-fall, with a fragile 
birch tree bending over the foam; at the fork 
of a branch, almost wet with the cataract's 
spray, a robin sat on its nest. The first was 
only Stagnation ; the last was Rest. For in 
Rest there are always two elements — tranquil- 
lity and energy; silence and turbulence; crea- 
tion and destruction ; fearlessness and fearful - 
ness. This it was in Christ. 

It is quite plain from all this that whatever 
else He claimed to be or to do, He at least 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 55 

knew how to live. All this is the perfection of 
living, of living in the mere sense of passing 
through the world in the best way. Hence 
His anxiety to communicate His idea of life to 
others. He came, He said, to give men life, 
true life, a more abundant life than they were 
living; "the life," as the fine phrase in the 
Revised Version has it, "that is life indeed." 
This is what He himself possessed, and it was 
this which He offers to all mankind. And 
hence His direct appeal for all to come to Him 
who had not made much of life, who were 
weary and heavy laden. These He would 
teach His secret. They, also, should know 
"the life that is life indeed." 



56 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 

There is still one doubt to clear up. After 
the statement, "Learn of Me," Christ throws 
in the disconcerting qualification, "Take My 
Yoke upon you and learn of Me." Why, if 
all this be true, does He call it a yoke? Why, 
while professing to give Rest, does He with 
the next breath whisper "burden?" Is the 
Christian life, after all, what its enemies take 
it for — an additional weight to the already 
great woe of life, some extra punctiliousness 
about duty, some painful devotion to observ- 
ances, some heavy restriction and trammeling 
of all that is joyous and free in the world? Is 
life not hard and sorrowful enough without 
being fettered with yet another yoke? 

It is astounding how so glaring a misunder- 
standing of this plain sentence should ever 
have passed into currency. Did you ever stop 
to ask what a yoke is really for? Is it to be a 
burden to the animal which wears it? It is just 
the opposite. It is to make its burden light. 
Attached to the oxen in any other way than by 
a yoke, the plough would be intolerable. 
Worked by means of a yoke, it is light. A 
yoke is not an instrument of torture ; it is an 
instrument of mercy. It is not a malicious 
contrivance for making work hard ; it is a 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 57 

gentle device to make hard labor light. It is 
not meant to give pain, but to save pain. And 
yet men speak of the yoke of Christ as if it 
were a slavery, and look upon those who wear 
it as objects of compassion. For generations 
we have had homilies on "The Yoke of Christ/' 
some delighting in portraying its narrow exac- 
tions; some seeking in these exactions the 
marks of its divinity; others apologizing for it, 
and toning it down ; still others assuring us 
that, although it be very bad, it is not to be 
compared with the positive blessings of Christi- 
anity. How many, especially among the 
young, has this one mistaken phrase driven 
forever away from the kingdom of God? 
Instead of making Christ attractive, it makes 
Him out a taskmaster, narrowing life by petty 
restrictions, 'calling for self-denial where none 
is necessary, making misery a virtue under the 
plea that it is the yoke of Christ, and happiness 
criminal because it now and then evades it. 
According to this conception, Christians are at 
best the victims of a depressing fate; their life 
is a penance ; and their hope for the next world 
purchased by a slow martyrdom in this. 

The mistake has arisen from taking the word 
"yoke'' here in the same sense, as in the 
expressions "under the yoke," or "wear the 
yoke in his youth. " But in Christ's illustra- 
tion it is not the jiigum of the Roman soldier, 
but the simple "harness" or "ox-collar" of 
the Eastern peasant. It is the literal wooden 
yoke which He, with His own hands in the 
carpenter shop, had probably often made. He 



58 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

knew the difference between a smooth yoke 
and a rough one, a bad fit and a good fit : the 
difference also it made to the patient animal 
which had to wear it. The rough yoke galled, 
and the burden was heavy; the smooth yoke 
caused no pain, and the burden was lightly 
drawn. The badly-fitted harness was a misery ; 
the well-fitted collar was "easy. " 

And what was the 4 'burden?' ' It was not 
some special burden laid upon the Christian, 
some unique infliction that they alone must 
bear. It was what all men bear. It was 
simply life, human life itself, the general 
burden of life which all must carry with 
them from the cradle to the grave. 
Christ saw that men took life painfully. To 
some it was a weariness, to others a failure, to 
many a tragedy, to all a struggle and a pain. 
How to carry this burden of life had been the 
whole world's problem. It is still the whole 
world's problem. And here is Christ's solu- 
tion: "Carry it as I do. Take life as I take it. 
Look at it from My point of view. Interpret 
it upon My principles. Take My yoke and 
learn of Me, and you will find it easy. For 
My yoke is easy, works easily, sits right upon 
the shoulders, and therefore My burden is 
light." 

There is no suggestion here that religion 
will absolve any man from bearing burdens. 
That would be to absolve him from living, 
since it is life itself that is the burden. What 
Christianity does propose is to make it toler- 
able. Christ's yoke is simply His secret for 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 59 

the alleviation of human life, His prescription 
for the best and happiest method of living. 
Men harness themselves to the work and stress 
of the world in clumsy and unnatural ways. 
The harness they put on is antiquated. A 
rough, ill-fitted collar at the best, they make its 
strain and friction past enduring, by placing it 
where the neck is most sensitive ; and by mere 
continuous irritation this sensitiveness 
increases until the whole nature is quick and 
sore. 

This is the origin, among other things, of a 
disease called * 4 touchiness" — a disease which, 
in spite of its innocent name, is one of the 
gravest sources of restlessness in the world. 
Touchiness, when it becomes chronic, is a 
morbid condition of the inward disposition. It 
is self-love inflamed to the acute point ; con- 
ceit, with a hair-trigger. The cure is to shift 
the yoke to some other place ; to let men and 
things touch us through some new and perhaps 
as yet unused part of our nature; to become 
meek and lowly in heart while the old nature 
is becoming numb from want of use. It is 
the beautiful work of Christianity everywhere 
to adjust the burden of life to those who bear 
it, and them to it. It has a perfectly miracu- 
lous gift of healing. Without doing any vio- 
lence to human nature it sets it right with life, 
harmonizing it with all surrounding t> ! ' \ 
and restoring those who are jaded with tne 
fatigue and dust of the world to a new grace of 
living. In the mere matter of altering the 
perspective of life and changing the proportion 



60 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

of things, its functions in lightening the care 
of man is altogether its own. The weight of 
a load depends upon the attraction of the earth. 
But suppose the attraction of the earth were 
removed? A ton on some other planet, where 
the attraction of gravity is less, does not w T eigh 
half a ton. Now Christianity removes the 
attraction of the earth, and this is one way in 
which it diminishes men's burden. It makes 
them citizens of another world. What was a 
ton yesterday is not half a ton to-day. So 
without changing one's circumstances, merely 
by offering a wider horizon and a different 
standard, it alters the whole aspect of the 
world. 

Christianity as Christ taught is the truest 
philosophy of life ever spoken. But let us be 
quite sure when we speak of Christianity that 
we mean Christ's Christianity. Other versions 
are either caricatures, or exaggerations, or mis- 
understandings, or shortsighted and surface 
readings. For the most part their attainment is 
hopeless and the results wretched. But I care 
not who the person is, or through what vale of 
tears he has passed, or is about to pass, there 
is a new life for him along this path. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 61 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 

Were Rest my subject, there are other 
things I should wish to say about it, and other 
kinds of Rest of which I should like to speak. 
But that is not my subject. My theme is that 
the Christian experiences are not the work of 
magic, but come under the law of Cause and 
Effect. And I have chosen Rest only as a 
single illustration of the working of that prin- 
ciple. If there were time I might next run 
over all the Christian experiences in turn, and 
show how the same wide law applies to each. 
But I think it may serve the better purpose if 
I leave this further exercise to yourselves. I 
know no Bible study that you will find more 
full of fruit, or which will take you nearer to 
the ways of God, or make the Christian life 
itself more solid or more sure. I shall add 
only a single other illustration of what I mean, 
before I close. 

Where does Joy come from? I knew a Sun- 
day scholar whose conception of Joy was that 
it was a thing made in lumps and kept some- 
where in Heaven, and that when people 
prayed for it, pieces were somehow let down 
and fitted into their souls. I am not sure that 
views as gross and material are not often held 
by people who ought to be wiser. In reality, 



62 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

Joy is as much a matter of Cause and Effect 
as pain. No one can get Joy by merely ask- 
ing for it. It is one of the ripest fruits of the 
Christian life, and, like all fruits, must be 
grown. There is a very clever trick in India 
called the mango-trick. A seed is put in the 
ground and covered up, and after divers in- 
cantations a full-blown mango bush appears 
within five minutes. I never met any one who 
knew how the thing was done, but I never met 
any one who believed it to be anything else 
than a conjuring-trick. The world is pretty 
unanimous now in its belief in the orderliness 
of Nature. Men may not know how fruits 
grow, but they do know that they cannot grow 
in five minutes. Some lives have not even a 
stalk on which fruits could hang, even if they 
did grow in five minutes. Some have never 
planted one sound seed of Joy in all their lives; 
and others who may have planted a germ or 
two have lived so little in sunshine that they 
never could come to maturity. 

Whence, then, is joy? Christ put His teach- 
ing upon this subject into one of the most ex- 
quisite of His parables. I should in any in- 
stance have appealed to His teaching here, as 
in the case of Rest, for I do not wish you to 
think I am speaking words of my own. But it 
so happens that He has dealt with it in words 
of unusual fulness. 

I need not recall the whole illustration. It 
is the parable of the Vine. Did you ever 
think why Christ spoke that parable? He did 
not merely throw it into space as a fine illus- 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 63 

tration of general truths. It was not simply a 
statement of the mystical union, and the doc- 
trine of an indwelling Christ. It was that; 
but it was more. After He had said it, He 
did what was not an unusual thing when He 
was teaching His greatest lessons. He turned 
to the disciples and said He would tell them 
why He had spoken it. It was to tell them 
how to get joy. ' 'These things have I spoken 
unto you/' He said, "that My joy might re- 
main in you and that your Joy might be full." 
It was a purposed and deliberate communica- 
tion of His secret of Happiness. 

Go back over these verses, then, and you 
will find the Causes of this Effect, the spring, 
and the only spring, out of which true Happi- 
ness comes. I am not going to analyze them 
in detail. I ask you to enter into the words 
for yourselves. Remember, in the first place, 
that the Vine was the Eastern symbol of Joy. 
It was its fruit that made glad the heart of 
man. Yet, however innocent that gladness — 
for the expressed juice of the grape was the 
common drink at every peasant's board — the 
gladness was only a gross and passing thing. 
This was not true happiness, and the vine of 
the Palestine vineyards was not the true vine. 
Christ was "the true Vine." Here, then, is 
the ultimate scource of Joy. Through what- 
ever media it reaches us, all true joy and Glad- 
ness find their source in Christ. By this, of 
course, is not meant that the actual Joy experi- 
enced is transferred from Christ's nature, or is 
something passed on from Him to us. What 



64 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

is passed on is His method of getting it. 
There is, indeed, a sense in which we can share 
another's joy or another's sorrow. But that 
is another matter. Christ is the source of Joy 
to men in the sense in which He is the source 
of Rest. His people share His life, and, there- 
fore, share its consequences, and one of these 
is Joy. His method of living is one that in 
the nature of things produces Joy. When He 
spoke of His Joy remaining with us, He meant 
in part that the causes which produced it 
should continue to act. His followers, that is 
to say, by repeating His life would experience 
its accompaniments. His Joy, His kind of 
Joy, would remain with them. 

The medium through which this Joy comes is 
next explained: "He that abideth in Me, the 
same bringeth forth much fruit." Fruit first, 
Joy next; the one the cause or medium of the 
other. Fruit-bearing is the necessary antece- 
dent ; Joy both the necessary consequent and the 
necessary accompaniment. It lay partly in 
the bearing fruit, partly in the fellowship 
which made that possible. Partly, that is to 
say, Joy lay in mere constant living in 
Christ's presence, with all that that implied of 
peace, of shelter and of love ; partly in the in- 
fluence of that Life upon mind and character 
and will ; and partly in the inspiration to live 
and work for others, with all that that brings 
of self-riddance and Joy in others' gain. All 
these, in different ways and at different times, 
are sources of pure Happiness. Even the sim- 
plest of them — to do good to other people — is 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 65 

an instant and infallible specific. There is no 
mystery about Happiness whatever. Put in 
the right ingredients and it must come out. 
He that abideth in Him will bring forth much 
fruit; and bringing forth much fruit is Happi- 
ness. The infallible recipe for Happiness, 
then, is to do good ; and the infallible receipt 
for doing good is to abide in Christ. The sur- 
est proof that all this is a plain matter of Cause 
and Effect is that men may try every other 
conceivable way of finding Happiness, and 
they will fail. Only the right cause in each 
case can produce the right effect. 

Then the Christian experiences are our own 
making? In the same sense in which grapes 
are our own making, and no more. All fruits 
grow — whether they grow in the soil or in the 
soul ; whether they are the fruits of the wild 
grape or of the True Vine. No man can make 
things grow. He can get them to grow by 
arranging all the circumstances and fulfilling 
all the conditions. But the growing is done 
by God. Causes and effects are eternal ar- 
rangements, set in the constitution of the 
world; fixed beyond man's ordering. What 
man can do is to place himself in the midst of 
a chain of sequences. Thus he can get things 
to grow ; thus he himself can grow. But the 
grower is the Spirit of God. 

What more need I add but this — test the 
method by experiment. Do not imagine that 
you have got these things because you know 
how to get them. As well try to feed upon a 
cookery book. But I think I can promise that 

5 Drunimond 



66 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

if you try in this simple and natural way, you 
will not fail. Spend the time you have spent 
in sighing for fruits in fulfilling the conditions 
of their growth. The fruits will come, must 
come. We have hitherto paid immense atten- 
tion to effects, to the mere experiences them- 
selves; we have described them, extolled 
them, advised them, prayed for them — done 
everything but find out what caused them. 
Henceforth let us deal with causes. "To be/' 
says Lotze, "is to be in relations. " About every 
other method of living the Christian life there 
is an uncertainty. About every other method 
of acquiring the Christian experiences there is 
a ' 'perhaps. " But in so far as this method is 
the way of nature, it cannot fail. Its guarantee 
is the laws of the universe, and these are "the 
Hands of the Living God." 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 67 



THE TRUE VINE. 

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the 
husbandman. Every branch in me that bear- 
eth not fruit he taketh away: and every 
branch that beareth fruit he purgeth it, that it 
may bring forth more fruit. Now ye are 
clean through the word which I have spoken 
unto you. Abide in me, and I in you. As 
the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it 
abide in the vine ; no more can ye, except ye 
abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the 
branches: he that abideth in me, and I in 
qim, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for 
without me ye can do nothing. If a man 
abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, 
and is withered; and men gather them, and 
cast them into the fire, and they are burned. 
If ye abide in me, and my word abide in you, 
ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done 
unto you. Herein is my father glorified, that 
ye may bear much fruit ; so ye shall be my 
disciples. As the Father hath loved me, so 
have I loved you : continue ye in my love. If 
ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in 
my love; even as I have kept my Father's 
commandments, and abide in his love. These 
things have I spoken unto you, that my joy 
might remain in you, and that your joy might 
be full." 



THE CHANGED LIFE. 



69 



PREFACE. 

Last autumn, in a book-shop in California, 
the author found a little book with his name 
upon the title-page — a book which he did not 
know existed ; which he never wrote ; nor bap- 
tized with the title which it bore. This stray 
publication —taken from shorthand notes of a 
spoken Address, — he does not grudge. Al- 
ready, it seems, it has done its small measure 
of good. But owing to the imperfections 
which it contains it has been thought right to 
issue a more complete edition. 

The theme, like its predecessors in this 
series, represents but a single aspect of its 
great subject — the manward side. The light 
and shade is apportioned with this in view. 
And the reader's kind attention is asked to this 
limitation, lest he wonder at points being left 
in shadow which theology has always, and 
rightly, taught us to emphasize. 

It was the hearing of a simple talk by a 
friend to some plain people in a Highland 
deer-forest which first called the author's 
attention to the practicalness of this solution 
of the cardinal problem of Christian experi- 
ence. What follows owes a large debt to that 
Sunday morning. 



71 



THE CHANGED LIFE. 



"I protest that if some great power would agree to 
make me always think what is true and do what is 
right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock 
and wound up every morning, I should instantly close 
with the offer." 

These are the words of Mr. Huxley. The 
infinite desirability, the infinite difficulty of 
being good — the theme is as old as humanity. 
The man does not live from whose deeper 
being the same confession has not risen, or 
who would not give his all to-morrow, if he 
could "close with the offer, " of becoming a 
better man. 

I propose to make that offer now. In all 
seriousness, without being "turned into a sort 
of clock, ' ' the end can be attained. Under the 
right conditions it is as natural for character 
to become beautiful as for a flower; and if on 
God's earth there is not some machinery for 
effecting it, the supreme gift to the world has 
been forgotten. This is simply what man 
was made for. With Browning: "I say that 
Man was made to grow, not stop. ' ' Or in the 
deeper words of an older Book: "Whom He 
did foreknow, He also did predestinate ... to 
be conformed to the Image of His Son." 

Let me begin by naming, and in part discard- 
73 



74 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

ing, some processes in vogue already, for pro- 
ducing better lives. These processes are far 
from wrong; in their place they may even be 
essential. One ventures to disparage them 
only because they do not turn out the most 
perfect possible work. 

The first imperfect method is to rely on 
Resolution. In will-power, in mere spasms of 
earnestness there is no salvation. Struggle, 
effort, even agony, have their place in Christi- 
anity, as we shall see ; but this is not where 
they come in. In mid-Atlantic the other day, 
the Etruria, in which I was sailing, suddenly 
stopped. Something had gone wrong with 
the engines. There were five hundred able- 
bodied men on board the ship. Do you think 
that if we had gathered together and pushed 
against the mast we could have pushed it on? 
When one attempts to sanctify himself by 
effort, he is trying to make his boat go by 
pushing against the mast. He is like a drown- 
ing man trying to lift himself out of the water 
by pulling at the hair of his own head. Christ 
held up this method almost to ridicule when 
he said, "Which of you by taking thought can 
add a cubit to his stature?" The one redeem- 
ing feature of the self-sufficient method is this 
— that those who try it find out almost at once 
that it will not gain the goal. 

Another experimenter says: "But that is 
not my method. I have seen the folly of a 
mere wild struggle in the dark. I work on a 
principle. My plan is not to waste power on 
random effort, but to concentrate on a single 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 75 

sin. By taking one at a time, and crucifying 
it steadily, I hope in the end to extirpate all. ' ' 
To this, unfortunately, there are four objec- 
tions: For one thing, life is too short; the 
name of sin is Legion. For another thing, to 
deal with individual sins is to leave the rest 
of the nature for the time untouched. In the 
third place, a single combat with a special sin 
does not affect the root and spring of the dis- 
ease. If only one of the channels of sin be 
obstructed, experience points to an almost cer- 
tain overflow through some other part of the 
nature. Partial conversion is almost always 
accompanied by such moral leakage, for the 
pent-up energies accumulate to the bursting 
point, and the last state of that soul may be 
worse than the first. In the last place, religion 
does not consist in negatives, in stopping this 
sin and stopping that. The perfect character 
can never be produced with a pruning knife. 
But a third protests: "So be it. I make no 
attempt to stop sins one by one. My method 
is just the opposite. I copy the virtues one 
by one." The difficulty about the copying 
method is that it is apt to be mechanical. One 
can always tell an engraving from a picture, an 
artificial flower from a real flower. To copy 
virtues one by one has somewhat the same 
effect as eradicating the vices one by one ; the 
temporary result is an overbalanced and in- 
congruous character. Some one defines a prig 
as "a creature that is over-fed for its size/ ' 
One sometimes finds Christians of this spe- 
cies — over-fed on one side of their nature, but 



76 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

dismally thin and starved-looking on the other 
The result, for instance, of copying Humility, 
and adding it on to an otherwise worldly life, 
is simply grotesque. A rabid temperance ad- 
vocate, for the same reason, is often the poor- 
est of creatures, flourishing on a single virtue, 
and quite oblivious that his Temperance is 
making a worse man of him and not a better. 
These are examples of fine virtues spoiled by 
association with mean companions. Character 
is a unity, and all the virtues must advance 
together to make the perfect man. This 
method of sanctification, nevertheless, is in the 
true direction. It is only in the details of ex- 
ecution that it fails. 

A fourth method I need scarcely mention, 
for it is a variation of those already named. 
It is the very young man's method; and the 
pure earnestness of it makes it almost desecra- 
tion to touch it. It is to keep a private note- 
book with columns for the days of the week, 
and a list of virtues with spaces against each 
for marks. This, with many stern rules for 
preface, is stored away in a secret place, and 
from time to time, at nightfall, the soul is 
arraigned before it as before a private judg- 
ment bar. This living by code was Franklin's 
method ; and I suppose thousands more could 
tell how they had hung up in their bed-rooms, 
or hid in lock-fast drawers, the rules which 
one solemn day they drew up to shape their 
lives. This method is not erroneous, only 
somehow its success is poor. You bear me 
witness that it fails. And it fails generally for 




" Religion does not consist in negatives." — Page 75. 

Druinmond's Addresses. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 77 

very matter-of-fact reasons — most likely be- 
cause one day we forget the rules. 

All these methods that have been named — 
the self-sufficient method, the self-crucifixion 
method, the mimetic method, and the diary 
method — are perfectly human, perfectly natu- 
ral, perfectly ignorant, and, as they stand, per- 
fectly inadequate. It is not argued, I repeat, 
that they must be abandoned. Their harm is 
rather that they distract attention from the 
true working method, and secure a fair result 
at the expense of the perfect one. What that 
perfect method is we shall now go on to ask. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 



THE FORMULA OF SANCTIFICATION. 

A formula, a receipt, for Sanctification — can 
one seriously speak of this mighty change as 
if the process were as definite as for the produc- 
tion of so many volts of electricity? It is im- 
possible to doubt it. Shall a mechanical ex- 
periment succeed infallibly, and the one vital 
experiment of humanity remain a chance? Is 
corn to grow by method, and character by ca- 
price? If we cannot calculate to a certainty 
that the forces of religion will do their work 
then is religion vain. And if we cannot ex- 
press the law of these forces in simple words, 
then is Christianity not the world's religion, 
but the world's conundrum. 

Where, then, shall one look for such a for- 
mula? Where one would look for any formula 
— among the text-books. And if we turn to 
the text-books of Christianity we shall find a 
formula for this problem as clear and precise 
as any in the mechanical sciences. If this 
simple rule, moreover, be but followed fear- 
lessly, it will yield the result of a perfect char- 
acter as surely as any result that is guaranteed 
by the laws of nature. The finest expression 
of this rule in Scripture, or indeed in any 
literature, is probably one drawn up and con- 
densed into a single verse by Paul. You will 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 79 

find it in a letter — the second to the Corinthi- 
ans — written by him to some Christian people 
who, in a city which was a byword for deprav- 
ity and licentiousness, were seeking the higher 
life. To see the point of the words we must 
take them from the immensely improved 
rendering of the Revised translation, for the 
older Version in this case greatly obscures the 
sense. They are these : "We all, with unveiled 
face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, 
are transformed into the same image from 
glory to glory, even as from the Lord the 
Spirit." 

Obvious as it ought to seem, this may be to 
some an almost startling revelation. The 
change we have been striving after is not to 
be produced by any more striving after. It is 
to be wrought upon us by the moulding of 
hands beyond our own. As the branch 
ascends, and the bud bursts, and the fruit red- 
dens under the co-operation of influences from 
the outside air, so man rises to the higher 
stature under invisible pressures from without. 
The radical defect of all our former methods 
of sanctification was the attempt to generate 
from within that which can only be wrought 
upon us from without. According to the first 
Law of Motion : Every body continues in its 
state of rest, or of uniform motion in a 
straight line, except in so far as it may be 
compelled by impressed forces to change that 
state. This is also a first law of Christianity. 
Every man's character remains as it is, or con- 
tinues in the direction in which it is going, un- 



80 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

til it is compelled by impressed forces to 
change that state. Our failure has been the 
failure to put ourselves in the way of the im- 
pressed forces. There is a clay, and there is a 
Potter; we have tried to get the clay to mould 
the clay. 

Whence, then, these pressures, and where 
this Potter? The answer of the formula is 
44 By reflecting as a mirror the glory of the 
Lord we are changed. ' ' But this is not very 
clear. What is the 4 'glory" of the Lord, and 
how can mortal man reflect it, and how can 
that act as an "impressed force" in moulding 
him to a nobler form? The word "glory" — 
the word which has to bear the weight of hold- 
ing those "impressed forces" — is a stranger in 
current speech, and our first duty is to seek 
out its equivalent in working English. It sug- 
gests at first a radiance of some kind, some- 
thing dazzling or glittering, some halo such as 
the old masters loved to paint round the heads 
of their Ecce Homos. But that is paint, mere 
matter, the visible symbol of some unseen 
thing. What is that unseen thing? It is that 
of all unseen things the most radiant, the most 
beautiful, the most Divine, and that is Charac- 
ter. On earth, in Heaven, there is nothing so 
great, so glorious as this. The word has 
many meanings; in ethics it can have but one. 
Glory is character, and nothing less, and it 
can be nothing more. The earth is "full of 
the glory of the Lord," because it is full of 
His character. The "Beauty of the Lord" is 
character. " The effulgence of His Glory" is 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 81 

character. "The Glory of the Only Begot- 
ten" is character, the character which is "full- 
ness of grace and truth. ' ' And when God told 
His people His name, He simply gave them 
His character, His character which was Him- 
self: "And the Lord proclaimed the name of 
the Lord . . . the Lord, the Lord God, merci- 
ful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant 
in goodness and truth." Glory then is not 
something intangible, or ghostly, or transcen 
dental. If it were this, how could Paul ask 
men to reflect it? Stripped of its physical en- 
swathement, it is Beauty, moral and spiritual 
Beauty, Beauty infinitely real, infinitely ex- 
alted, yet infinitely near and infinitely commu- 
nicable. 

With this explanation read over the sentence 
once more in paraphrase : We all reflecting as 
a mirror the character of Christ are trans- 
formed into the same Image from character to 
character — from a poor character to a better 
one, from a better one to one a little better 
still, from that to one still more complete, un- 
til by slow degrees the Perfect Image is at- 
tained. Here the solution of the problem of 
sanctification is compressed into a sentence: 
Reflect the character of Christ, and you will 
become like Christ. 

All men are mirrors — that is the first law on 
which this formula is based. One of the apt- 
est descriptions of a human being is that he is 
a mirror. As we sat at table to-night the 
world in which each of us lived and moved 
throughout this day was focused in the room. 

6 Drumniond 



82 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

What we saw as we looked at one another was 
not one another, but one another's world. We 
were an arrangement of mirrors. The scenes 
we saw were all reproduced; the people we 
met walked to and fro; they spoke, they 
bowed, they passed us by, did everything over 
again as if it had been real. When we talked, 
we were but looking at our own mirror and 
describing what flitted across it ; our listening 
was not hearing, but seeing — we but looked 
on our neighbor's mirror. All human inter- 
course is a seeing of reflections. I meet a 
stranger in a railway carriage. The cadence 
of his first word tells me he is English, and 
comes from Yorkshire. Without knowing it 
he has reflected his birthplace, his parents, and 
the long history of their race. Even physio- 
logically he is a mirror. His second sentence 
records that he is a politician, and a faint in- 
flection in the way he pronounces "The Times" 
reveals his party. In his next remarks I see 
reflected a whole world of experiences. The 
books he has read, the people he has met, the 
influences that have played upon him and 
made him the man he is — these are all regis- 
tered there by a pen which lets nothing pass, 
and whose writing can never be blotted out. 
What I am reading in him meantime he also is 
reading in me ; and before the journey is over 
we could half write each other's lives. Wheth- 
er we like it or not, we live in glass houses. 
The mind, the memory, the soul, is simply a 
vast chamber paneled with looking-glass. 
And upon this miraculous arrangement and 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 83 

endowment depends the capacity of mortal 
souls to "reflect the character of the Lord." 

But this is not all. If all these varied reflec- 
tions from our so-called secret life are patent 
to the world, how close the writing, how com- 
plete the record, within the soul itself! For 
the influences we meet are not simply held for 
a moment on the polished surface and thrown 
off again into space. Each is retained where 
first it fell, and stored up in the soul forever. 

This law of Assimilation is the second, and by 
far the most impressive truth which underlies 
the formula of sanctification — the truth that 
men are not only mirrors, but that these mir- 
rors, so far from being mere reflectors of the 
fleeting things they see, transfer into their own 
inmost substance, and hold in permanent pres- 
ervation, the things that they reflect. No one 
knows how the soul can hold these things. No 
one knows how the miracle is done. No phe- 
nomenon in nature, no process in chemistry, 
no chapter in necromancy can ever help us to 
begin to understand this amazing operation. 
For, think of it, the past is not only focused 
there, in a man's soul, it is there. How could 
it be reflected from there if it were not there? 
All things that he has ever seen, known, felt, 
believed of the surrounding world are now 
within him, have become part of him, in part 
are him — he has been changed into their image. 
He may deny it, he may resent it, but they are 
there. They do not adhere to him, they are 
transfused through him. He cannot alter or 
rub them out. They are not in his memory, 



84 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

they are in him. His soul is as they have filled 
it, made it, left it. These things, these books, 
these events, these influences are his makers. 
In their hands are life and death, beauty and 
deformity. When once the image or likeness 
of any of these is fairly presented to the soul, 
no power on earth can hinder two things hap- 
pening — it must be absorbed into the soul, and 
forever reflected back again from character. 

Upon these astounding yet perfectly obvious 
psychological facts, Paul bases his doctrine of 
sanctification. He sees that character is a 
thing built up by slow degrees, that it is hourly 
changing for better or for worse according to 
the images which flit across it. One step fur- 
ther and the whole length and breadth of the 
application of these ideas to the central prob- 
lem of religion will stand before us. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES, 85 



THE ALCHEMY OF INFLUENCE. 

If events change men, much more persons. 
No man can meet another on the street with- 
out making some mark upon him. We say we 
exchange words when we meet; what we ex- 
change is souls. And when intercourse is very 
close and very frequent, so complete is this ex- 
change that recognizable bits of the one soul 
begin to show in the other's nature, and the 
second is conscious of a similar and growing 
debt to the first. 

This mysterious approximating of two souls 
who has not witnessed? Who has not watched 
some old couple come down life's pilgrimage 
hand in hand, with such gentle trust and joy 
in one another that their very faces wore the 
self- same look? These were not two souls; it 
was a composite soul. It did not matter to 
which of the two you spoke, you would have 
said the same words to either. It was quite 
indifferent which replied, each would have 
said the same. Half a century's reflecting had 
told upon them ; they were changed into the 
same image. It is the Law of Influence that 
we become like those whom we habitually ad- 
mire; these had become like because they 
labitually admired. Through all the range of 
literature, of history, and biography this law 



86 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

presides. Men are all mosaics of other men. 
There was a savor of David about Jonathan 
and a savor of Jonathan about David. Jean 
Valjean, in the masterpiece of Victor Hugo, is 
Bishop Bienvenu risen from the dead. Met- 
empsychosis is a fact. George Eliot's message 
to the world was that men and women make 
men and women. The Family, the cradle of 
mankind, has no meaning apart from this. 
Society itself is nothing but a rallying point 
for these omnipotent forces to do their work. 
On the doctrine of Influence, in short, the 
whole vast pyramid of humanity is built. 

But it was reserved for Paul to make the 
supreme application of the Law of Influence. 
It was a tremendous inference to make, but he 
never hesitated. He himself was a changed 
man; he knew exactly what had done it; it 
was Christ. On the Damascus road they met, 
and from that hour his life was absorbed in 
His. The effect could not but follow — on 
words, on deeds, on career, on creed. The 
"impressed forces' ' did their vital work. He 
became like Him Whom he habitually loved. 
"So we all," he writes, "reflecting as a mir- 
ror the glory of Christ, are changed into the 
same image. " 

Nothing could be more simple, more intelli- 
gible, more natural, more supernatural. It is 
an analogy from an every-day fact. Since we 
are what we are by the impacts of those who 
surround us, those who surround themselves 
with the highest will be those who change into 
the highest. There are some men and some 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 87 

women in whose company we are always at our 
best. While with them we cannot think mean 
thoughts or speak ungenerous words. Their 
mere presence is elevation, purification, sanc- 
tity. All the best stops in our nature are 
drawn out by their intercourse, and we find a 
music in our souls that was never there before. 
Suppose even that influence prolonged through 
a month, a year, a lifetime, and what could 
not life become? Here even on the common 
plane of life, talking our language, walking 
our streets, working side by side, are sancti- 
fiers of souls; here, breathing through common 
clay, is Heaven; here, energies charged even 
through a temporal medium with the virtue of 
regeneration. If to live with men, diluted to 
the millioneth degree with the virtue of the 
Highest, can exalt and purify the nature, what 
bounds can be set to the influence of Christ? 
To live with Socrates — with unveiled face — 
must have made one wise; with Aristides, just. 
Francis of Assisi must have made one gentle; 
Savonarola, strong. But to have lived with 
Christ must have made one like Christ; that is 
to say, A Christian. 

As a matter of fact, to live with Christ did 
produce this effect. It produced it in the case 
of Paul. And during Christ's lifetime the ex- 
periment was tried in an even more startling 
form. A few raw, unspiritual, uninspiring 
men, were admitted to the inner circle of His 
friendship. The change began at once. Day 
T^y day we can almost see the first disciple 
grow. First there steals over them the faint- 



88 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

est possible adumbration of His character, and 
occasionally, very occasionally, they do a thing 
or say a thing that they could not have done 
or said had they not been living there. Slowly 
the spell of His Life deepens. Reach after 
reach of their nature is overtaken, thawed, sub- 
jugated, sanctified. Their manner softens, 
their words become more gentle, their conduct 
more unselfish. As swallows who have found 
a summer, as frozen buds the spring, their 
starved humanity bursts into a fuller life. 
They do not know how it is, but they are dif- 
ferent men. One day they find themselves 
like their Master, going about and doing good. 
To themselves it is unaccountable, but they 
cannot do otherwise. They were not told to 
do it, it came to them to do it. But the people 
who watch them know well how to account for 
it — "They have been," they whisper, "with 
Jesus." Already even, the mark and seal of 
His character is upon them — "They have been 
with Jesus/' Unparalleled phenomenon that 
these poor fishermen should remind other men 
of Christ! Stupendous victory and mystery of 
regeneration that mortal men should suggest 
to the world, God ! 

There is something almost melting in the 
way His contemporaries, and John especially, 
speak of the influence of Christ. John lived 
himself in daily wonder at Him ; he was over- 
powered, overawed, entranced, transfigured. 
To his mind it was impossible for any one to 
come under this influence and ever be the same 
again. "Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 89 

not," he said. It was inconceivable that he 
should sin, as inconceivable as that ice should 
live in a burning sun, or darkness coexist with 
noon. If any one did sin, it was to John the 
simple proof that he could never have met 
Christ. " Whosoever sinneth," he exclaims, 
4 'hath not seen Him, neither know Him." Sin 
was abashed in this Presence. Its roots with- 
ered. Its sway and victory were forever at an 
end. 

But these were His contemporaries. It was 
easy for them to be influenced by Him, for 
they were every day and all the day together. 
But how can we mirror that which we have 
never seen? How can all this stupendous re- 
sult be produced by a Memory, by the scanti- 
est of all Biographies, by One who lived and 
left this earth eighteen hundred years ago? 
How can modern men to-day make Christ, the 
absent Christ, their most constant companion 
still? The answer is that Friendship is a spir- 
itual thing. It is independent of Matter, or 
Space, or Time. That which I love in my 
friend is not that which I see. What influ- 
ences me in my friend is not his body, but his 
spirit. It would have been an ineffable expe- 
rience truly to have lived at that time — 

"I think when I read the sweet story of old 
How when Jesus was here among men, 
He took little children like lambs to his fold, 
I should like to have been with Him then. 

"I wish that His hand had been laid on my head, 
That His arms had been thrown around me, 
And that I had seen His kind look when he said, 
'Let the little ones come unto me.' " 



r 



U 



90 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

And yet, if Christ were to come into the world 
again' few of us probably would ever have a 
chance of seeing Him. Millions of her sub- 
jects, in this little country, have never seen 
their own Queen. And there would be mil- 
lions of the subjects of Christ who could never 
get within speaking distance of Him if He 
were here. Our companionship with Him, 
like all true companionship, is a spiritual com- 
munion. All friendship, all love, human and 
Divine, is purely spiritual. It was after He 
was risen that He influenced even the disciples 
most. Hence in reflecting the character of 
Christ, it is no real obstacle that we may never 
have been in visible contact with Himself. 

There lived once a young girl whose perfect 
grace of character was the wonder of those 
who knew her. She wore on her neck a gold 
locket which no one was ever allowed to open. 
One day, in a moment of unusual confidence, 
one of her companions was allowed to touch 
its spring and learn its secret. She saw writ- 
ten these words — "Whom having not seen, I 
love." That was the secret of her beautiful 
life. She had been changed into the Same 
Image. 

Now this is not imitation, but a much deeper 
thing. Mark this distinction. For the differ- 
ence in the process, as well as in the result, 
may be as great as that between a photograph 
secured by the infallible pencil of the sun, 
and the rude outline from a school-boy's chalk. 
Imitation is mechanical, reflection organic. 
The one is occasional, the other habitual. In 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 91 

the one case, man comes to God and imitates 
Him; in the other, God comes to man and 
imprints Himself upon him. It is quite true 
that there is an imitation of Christ which 
amounts to reflection. But Paul's term in- 
cludes all that the other holds, and is open to 
no mistake. 

4 * Make Christ your most constant companVl: 
ion" — this is what it practically means for us. 
Be more under His influence than under any 
other influence. Ten minutes spent in His 
society every day, ay, two minutes if it be face 
to face, and heart to heart, will make the 
whole day different. Every character has an / 
inward spring, let Christ be it. Every action \ 
has a key-note, let Christ set it. r^¥HStef3ay 
you got a certain letter. You sat down and 
wrote a reply which almost scorched the paper. 
You picked the cruelest adjectives you knew 
and sent it forth, without a pang, to do its 
ruthless work. You did that because your life 
was set in the wrong key. You began the day 
with the mirror placed at the wrong angle. 
To-morrow, at day-break, turn it towards Him, 
and even to your enemy the fashion of your 
countenance will be changed. Whatever you 
then do, one thing you will find you could not 
do — you could not write that letter. Your 
first impulse may be the same, your judgment 
may be unchanged, but if you try it the ink 
will dry on your pen, and you will rise from, 
your desk an unavenged, but a greater and 
more Christian, man. Throughout the whole 
day your actions, down to the last detail, will 



92 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

do homage to that early vision. Yesterday 
you thought mostly about yourself. To-day 
the poor will meet you, and you will feed 
them. The helpless, the tempted, the sad, will 
throng about you, and each you will befriend. 
Where were all these people yesterday? Where 
they are to-day, but you did not see them. It 
is in reflected light that the poor are seen. 
But your soul to-day is not at the ordinary 
angle. " Things which are not seen" are vis- 
ible. For a few short hours you live the Eter- 
nal Life. The eternal life, the life of faith, 
is simply the life of the higher vision. Faith 
is an attitude — a mirror set at the right angle. 
When to-morrow is over, and in the evening 
you review it, you will wonder how you did it. 
You will not be conscious that you strove for 
anything, or imitated anything, or crucified 
anything. You will be conscious of Christ; 
that he was with you, that without compulsion 
you were yet compelled, that without force, or 
noise, or proclamation, the revolution was 
accomplished. You do not congratulate your- 
self as one who has done a mighty deed, or 
achieved a personal success, or stored up a fund 
of "Christian experience" to ensure the same 
result again. What you are conscious of is 
"the glory of the Lord. " And what the world 
is conscious of, if the result be a true one, is 
also "the glory of the Lord." In looking at 
a mirror one does not see the mirror, or think 
of it, but only of what it reflects. For a mir- 
ror never calls attention to itself — except when 
there are flaws in it. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 93 

That this is a real experience and not a 
vision, that this life is possible to men, is being 
lived by men to-day, is simple biographical 
fact. From a thousand witnesses I cannot 
forbear to summon one. The following are 
the words of one of the highest intellects this 
age has known, a man who shared the bur- 
dens of his country as few have done, and who, 
not in the shadows of old age, but in the high 
noon of his success, gave this confession — I 
quote it with only a few abridgments — to the 
world : 

"I want to speak to-night only a little, but 
that little I desire to speak of the sacred name 
of Christ, who is my life, my inspiration, my 
hope, and my surety. I cannot help stopping 
and looking back upon the past. And I wish, 
as if I had never done it before, to bear wit- 
ness, not only that it is by the grace of God, 
but that it is by the grace of God, as manifested 
in Christ Jesus, that I am what I am. I recog- 
nize the sublimity and grandeur of the revela- 
tion of God in His eternal fatherhood as one 
that made the heavens, that founded the earth, 
and that regards all the tribes of the earth, 
comprehending them in one universal mercy; 
but it is the God that is manifested in Jesus 
Christ, revealed by His life, made known by 
the inflections of His feelings, by His discourse, 
and by His deeds — it is that God that I desire 
to confess to-night, and of whom I desire to 
say, 'By the love of God in Christ Jesus I 
am what I am.' 

"If you ask me precisely what I mean by 



94 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

that, I say, frankly, that more than any recog- 
nized influence of my father or my mother upon 
me ; more than the social influence of all the 
members of my father's household, more, so 
far as I can trace it, or so far as I am made 
aware of it, than all the social influences 
of every kind, Christ has had the forma- 
tion of my mind and my disposition. My 
hidden ideals of what is beautiful I have drawn 
from Christ. My thoughts of what is manly, 
and noble, and pure, have almost all of them 
arisen from the Lord Jesus Christ. Many men 
have educated themselves by reading Plu- 
tarch's Lives of the Ancient Worthies, and set- 
ting before themselves one and another of these 
that in different ages have achieved celebrity ; 
and they have recognized the great power of 
these men on themselves. Now I do not per- 
ceive that poet, or philosopher, or reformer, or 
\ general, or any other great man, ever has 
v dwelt in my imagination and in my thought 
as the simple Jesus has. For more than twenty- 
five years I instinctively have gone to Christ to 
draw a measure and a rule for everything. 
Whenever there has been a necessity for it, I 
have sought — and at last almost spontaneously 
— to throw myself into the companionship of 
. — Christ ; and early, by my imagination, I could 
see Him standing and looking quietly and lov- 
ingly upon me. There seemed almost to drop 
from His face an influence upon me that sug- 
gested what was the right thing in the con- 
trolling of passion, in the subduing of pride, in 
the overcoming of selfishness ; and it is from 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 95 

Christ, manifested to my inward eye, that I 
have consciously derived more ideals, more 
models, more influences, than any other 
human character whatever. 

4 'That is not all. I feel conscious that I have 
derived from the Lord Jesus Christ every 
thought that makes heaven a reality to me, and 
every thought that paves the road that lies 
between me and heaven. All my conceptions 
of the progress of grace in the soul ; all the 
steps by which divine life is evolved ; all the 
ideals that overhang the blessed sphere which 
awaits us beyond this world — these are derived 
from the Savior. The life that I now live in 
the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God. 

4 'That is not all. Much as my future in- 
cludes all these elements which go to make the 
blessed fabric of earthly life, yet, after all, 
what the summer is compared with all its 
earthly products — flowers, and leaves, and 
grass — that is Christ compared with all the 
products of Christ in my mind and in my 
soul. All the flowers and leaves of sympathy; 
all the twining joys that come from my heart 
as a Christian — these I take and hold in the 
future, but they are to me what the flowers 
and leaves of summer are compared with the 
sun that makes the summer. Christ is the 
Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end 
of my better life. 

"When I read the Bible, I gather a great 
deal from the Old Testament, and from the 
Pauline portions of the New Testament; but 
after all, I am conscious that the fruit of the 



96 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

Bible is Christ. That is what I read it for, 
and that is what I find that is worth reading. 
I have had a hunger to be loved of Christ. You 
all know, in some relations, what it is to be 
hungry for love. Your heart seems unsatisfied 
till you can draw something more toward you 
from those that are dearest to you. There 
have been times when I have had an unspeak- 
able heart-hunger for Christ's love. My sense 
of sin is never strong when I think of the law ; 
my sense of sin is strong when I think of love 
— if there is any difference between law and 
love. It is when drawing near the Lord 
Jesus Christ, and longing to be loved, that I 
have the most vivid sense of unsymmetry, of 
imperfection, of absolute unworthiness, and 
of my sinfulness. Character and conduct are 
never so vividly set before me as when in 
silence I bend in the presence of Christ, 
revealed not in wrath, but in love to me. I 
never so much long to be lovely, that I may 
be loved, as when I have this revelation of 
Christ before my mind. 

"In looking back upon my experience, that 
part of my life which stands out, and which I 
remember most vividly, is just that part that 
has had some conscious association with Christ. 
All the rest is pale, and thin, and lies like 
clouds on the horizon. Doctrines, systems, 
measures, methods — what may be called the 
necessary mechanical and external part of wor- 
ship ; the part which the senses would recog- 
nize — this seems to have withered and fallen 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 97 

off like leaves of last summer ; but that part 
which has taken hold of Christ abides." 

Can any one hear this life-music, with its 
throbbing refrain of Christ, and remain un- 
moved by envy or desire? Yet, till we have 
lived like this we have never lived at all. 



7 Drummond 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 



THE FIRST EXPERIMENT. 

Then you reduce religion to a common 
Friendship? A common Friendship — who 
talks of a common Friendship? There is no 
such thing in the world. On earth no word is 
more sublime. Friendship is the nearest 
thing we know to what religion is. God is 
love. And to make religion akin to Friendship 
is simply to give it the highest expression 
conceivable by man. But if by demurring to 
"a common friendship" is meant a protest 
against the greatest and the holiest in religion 
being spoken of in intelligible terms, then I 
am afraid the objection is all too real. Men 
always look for a mystery when one talks of 
sanctification ; some mystery apart from that 
which must ever be mysterious wherever Spirit 
works. It is thought some peculiar secret lies 
behind it, some occult experience which only 
the initiated know. Thousands of persons go 
to church every Sunday hoping to solve this 
mystery. At meetings, at conferences, many 
a time they have reached what they thought 
was the very brink of it, but somehow no 
further revelation came. Poring over relig- 
ious books, how often were they not within a 
paragraph of it; the next page, the next sen- 
tence, would discover all, and they would be 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 99 

borne on a flowing tide forever. But nothing 
happened. The next sentence and the next 
page were read, and still it eluded them ; and 
though the promise of its coming kept faith- 
fully up to the end, the last chapter found them 
still pursuing. Why did nothing happen? 
Because there was nothing to happen — nothing 
of the kind they were looking for. Why did 
it elude them? Because there was no "it. " 
When shall we learn that the pursuit of holi- 
ness is simply the pursuit of Christ? When 
shall we substitute for the "it" of a fictitious 
aspiration, the approach to a Living Friend? 
sanctity is in character and not in moods; 
Divinity in our own plain calm humanity, and 
in no mystic rapture of the soul. 

And yet there are others who, for exactly a 
contrary reason, will find scant satisfaction 
here. Their complaint is not that a religion 
expressed in terms of Friendship is too homely, 
but that it is still too mystical. To "abide" in 
Christ, to "make Christ our most constant com- 
panion/* is to them the purest mysticism. 
They want something absolutely tangible and 
absolutely direct. These are not the poetical 
souls who seek a sign, a mysticism in excess ; 
but the prosaic natures whose want is mathe- 
matical definition in details. Yet it is perhaps 
not possible to reduce this problem to much 
more rigid elements. The beauty of Friend- 
ship is its infinity. One can never evacuate 
life of mysticism. Home is full of it, love is 
full of it, religion is full of it. Why stumble 



100 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

at that in the relation of man to Christ which 
is natural in the relation of man to man? 

If any one cannot conceive or realize a 
mystical relation with Christ, perhaps all that 
can be done is to help him to step on to it by 
still plainer analogies from common life. 
How do I know Shakespeare or Dante? By 
communing with their words and thoughts. 
Many men know Dante better than their own 
fathers. He influences them more. As a 
spiritual presence he is more near to them, as 
a spiritual force more real. Is there any rea- 
son why a greater than Shakespeare or Dante, 
who also walked this earth, who left great 
words behind Him, who has greater works 
everywhere in the world now, should not also 
instruct, inspire, and mould the characters of 
men? I do not limit Christ's influence to this. 
It is this, and it is more. But Christ, so far 
from resenting or discouragingly this relation 
of Friendship, Himself proposed it. "Abide 
in me" was almost His last word to the world. 
And He partly met the difficulty of those who 
feel its intangibleness by adding the practical 
clause, "If ye abide in Me and My words abide 
in you." 

Begin with His words. Words can scarcely 
ever be long impersonal. Christ Himself was 
a Word, a word made Flesh. Make His words 
flesh ; do them, live them, and you must live 
Christ. * ' He that keepeth My commandments, 
he it is that loveth Me. " Obey Him and you 
must love Him. Abide in Him and you must 
obey Him. Cultivate His Friendship. Live 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 101 

after Christ, in His Spirit, as in His Presence, 
and it is difficult to think what more you can do. 
Take this at least as a first lesson, as introduc- 
tion. If you cannot at once and always feel 
the play of His life upon yours, watch for it 
also indirectly. "The whole earth is full of 
the character of the Lord." Christ is the 
Light of the world, and much of His Light is 
reflected from things in the world — even from 
clouds. Sunlight is stored in every leaf, from 
leaf through coal, and it comforts us thence 
when days are dark and we cannot see the sun. 
Christ shines through men, through books, 
through history, through nature, music, art. 
Look for Him there. "Every day one should 
either look at a beautiful picture, or hear 
beautiful music, or read a beautiful poem/' 
The real danger of mysticism is not making it 
broad enough. 

Do not think that nothing is happening 
because you do not see yourself grow, or hear 
the whir of the machinery. All great things 
grow noiselessly. You can see a mushroom 
grow, but never a child. Mr. Darwin tells us 
that Evolution proceeds by "numerous, suc- 
cessive, and slight modifications. ' ' Paul knew 
that, and put it, only in more beautiful words, 
into the heart of his formula. He said for the 
comforting of all slowly perfecting souls that 
they grew "from character to character. " 
"The inward man," he says elsewhere, "is 
renewed from day to day. " All through work 
is slow ; all true development by minute, slight, 
and insensible metamorphoses. The higher 



102 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

the structure, moreover, the slower the 
progress. As the biologist runs his eye over 
the long Ascent of Life he sees the lowest 
forms of animals develop in an hour ; the next 
above these reach maturity in a day; those 
higher still take weeks or months to perfect ; 
but the few at the top demand the long exper- 
iment of years. If a child and an ape are born 
on the same day, the last will be in full posses- 
sion of its faculties and doing the active work 
of life before the child has left its cradle. Life 
is the cradle of eternity. As the man is to the 
animal in the slowness of his evolution, so is 
the spiritual man to the natural man. Founda- 
tions which have to bear the weight of an 
eternal life must be surely laid. Character is 
to wear forever ; who will wonder or grudge 
that it cannot be developed in a day? 

To await the growing of a soul, neverthe- 
less, is an almost Divine act of faith. How 
pardonable, surely, the impatience of deform- 
ity with itself, of a consciously despicable char- 
acter standing before Christ, wondering, yearn- 
ing, hungering to be like that ! Yet must one 
trust the process fearlessly, and without mis- 
giving. "The Lord the Spirit" will do His 
part. The tempting expedient is, in haste for 
abrupt or visible progress, to try some method 
less spiritual, or to defeat the end by watching 
for effects instead of keeping the eye on the 
Cause. A photograph prints from the negative 
only while exposed to the sun. While the 
artist is looking to see how it is getting on he 
simply stops the getting on. Whatever of 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 103 

wise supervision the soul may need, it is certain 
it can never be over-exposed, or that, being 
exposed, anything else in the world can improve 
the result or quicken it. The creation of a 
new heart, the renewing of a right spirit, is an 
omnipotent work of God. Leave it to the 
Creator. "He which hath begun a good work 
in you will perfect it unto that day. ' ' 

No man, nevertheless, who feels the worth 
and solemnity of what is at stake will be care- 
less as to his progress. To become like Christ 
is the only thing in the world worth caring 
for, the thing before which every ambition of 
man is folly, and all lower achievement vain. 
Those only who make this quest the supreme 
desire and passion of their lives can ever begin 
to hope to reach it. If, therefore, it has 
seemed up to this point as if all depended on 
passivity, let me now assert, with conviction 
more intense, that all depends on activity. A 
religion of effortless adoration may be a relig- 
ion for an angel, but never for a man. Not in 
the contemplative, but in the active, lies true 
hope; not in rapture, but in reality, lies true 
life; not in the realm of ideals, but among 
tangible things, is man's sanctification wrought 
Resolution, effort, pain, self -crucifixion, agony 
— all the things already dismissed as futile in 
themselves must now be restored to office, and 
a tenfold responsibility laid upon them. For 
what is their office? Nothing less than to 
move the vast inertia of the soul, and place it, 
and keep it where the spiritual forces will act 
upon it. It is to rally the forces of the will, 



104 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES 

and keep the surface of the mirror bright and 
ever in position. It is to uncover the face 
which is to look at Christ, and draw down the 
veil when unhallowed sights are near. You 
have, perhaps, gone with an astronomer to 
watch him photograph the spectum of a star. 
As you entered the dark vault of the observa- 
tory you saw him begin by lighting a candle. 
To see the star with? No ; but to see to adjust 
the instrument to see the star with. It was 
the star that was going to take the photograph ; 
it was, also, the astronomer. For a long time 
he worked in the dimness, screwing tubes and 
polishing lenses and adjusting reflectors, and 
only after much labor the finely focused instru- 
ment was brought to bear. Then he blew out 
the light, and left the star to do its work upon 
the plate alone. The day's task for the Chris- 
tian is to bring his instrument to bear. Having 
done that he may blow out his candle. All 
the evidences of Christianity which have 
brought him there, all aids to faith, all acts of 
worship, all the leverages of the Church, all 
Prayer and Meditation, all girding of the Will 
— these lesser processes, these candle-light 
activities for that supreme hour, may be set 
aside. But, remember, it is but for an hour. 
The wise man will be he who quickest lights 
his candle ; the wisest he who never lets it out. 
To-morrow, the next moment, he, a poor, 
darkened, blurred soul, may need it again to 
focus the Image better, to take a mote off the 
lens, to clear the mirror from a breath with 
which the world has dulled it. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 105 

No readjustment is ever required on behalf 
of the Star. That is one great fixed point in 
this shifting universe. But the world moves. 
And each day, each hour, demands a further 
motion and readjustment for the soul. A tel- 
escope in an observatory follows a star by clock- 
work, but the clockwork of the soul is called 
the Will. Hence, while the soul in passivity 
reflects the Image of the Lord, the Will in 
intense activity holds the mirror in position lest 
the drifting motion of the world bear it beyond 
the line of vision. To " follow Christ" is 
largely to keep the soul in such position as will 
allow for the motion of the earth. And this 
calculated counteracting of the movements of 
the world, this holding of the mirror exactly 
opposite to the Mirrored, this steadying of the 
faculties unerringly through cloud and earth- 
quake, fire and sword, is the stupendous co- 
operating labor of the Will. It is all man's 
work. It is all Christ's work. In practice it 
is both; in theory it is both. But the wise 
man will say in practice, "It depends upon 
myself. ' ' 

In the Galerie des Beaux Arts in Paris there 
stands a famous statue. It was the last work 
of a great genius, who, like many a genius, 
was very poor, and lived in a garret, which 
served as a studio and sleeping-room alike. 
When the statue was all but finished, one mid- 
night a sudden frost fell upon Paris. The 
sculptor lay awake in the fireless room and 
thought of the still moist clay, thought how 
the water would freeze in the pores and destroy 



106 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

in an hour the dream of his life. So the old 
man rose from his couch and heaped the bed- 
clothes reverently round his work. In the 
morning when the neighbors entered the room 
the sculptor was dead. But the statue lived. 

The Image of Christ that is forming within 
us — that is life's one charge. Let every pro- 
ject stand aside for that. "Till Christ be 
formed/ ' no man's work is finished, no religion 
crowned, no life has fulfilled its end. Is the 
infinite task begun? When, how, are we to be 
different? Time cannot change men. Death 
cannot change men. Christ can. Wherefore 
put on Christ. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 107 



"FIRST !" 



A TALK WITH BOYS. 

I have three heads to give you. The first is 
4 4 Geography, ' ' the second is "Arithmetic, ' ' and 
the third is "Grammar." 

Geography. 

First. Geography tells tis where to find 
places. Where is the Kingdom of God? It is 
said that when a Prussian officer was killed in 
the Franco- Prussian war, a map of France was 
very often found in his pocket. When we 
wish to ccupy a country, we ought to know its 
geography. Now, where is the kingdom of 
God? A boy over there says, "It is in 
heaven." No, it is not in heaven. Another 
boy says, "It is in the Bible." No; it is not 
in the Bible. Another boy says, "It must be 
in the Church. ' ' No ; it is not in the Church. 
Heaven is only the capital of the kingdom of 
God; the Bible is the Guide-book to it; the 
Church is the weekly parade of those who be- 
long to it. If you would turn to the seven- 
teenth chapter of St. Luke you will find out 
where the kingdom of God really is. "The 
kingdom of God is within you" — within you. 
The kingdom of God is inside people. 



108 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

I remember once taking a walk by the river 
near where the Falls of Niagara are, and I 
noticed a remarkable figure walking along the 
river bank. I had been some time in America. 
I had seen black men, and red men, and yel- 
low men, and white men; black men. the 
Negroes; red men, the Indians; yellow men, 
the Chinese ; white men, the Americans. But 
this man looked different in his dress from 
anything I had ever seen. When he came a 
little closer, I saw he was wearing a kilt; 
when he came a little nearer still, I saw that 
he was dressed exactly like a Highland sol- 
dier. When he came quite near, I said to 
him, "What are you doing here"? "Why 
should I not be here?" he said. "Don't you 
know this is British soil? When you cross the 
river you come into Canada." This soldier 
was thousands of miles from England, and yet 
he was in the kingdom of England. Wher- 
ever there is an English heart beating loyal to 
the Queen of Britain, there is England. 
Wherever there is a boy whose heart is loyal 
to the King of the kingdom of God, the king- 
dom of God is within him. 

What is the kingdom of God? Every king- 
dom has its exports, its products. Go down to 
the river here, and you will find ships coming 
in with cotton; you know they come from 
America. You will find ships with tea; you 
know they are from China. Ships with wool; 
you know they come from Australia. Ships 
with sugar; you know they come from Java. 
What comes from the kingdom of God? Again 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 109 

we must refer to our Guide-book. Turn to 
Romans, and we shall find what the kingdom 
of God is. I will read it: "The kingdom of 
God is righteousness, peace, joy" — three 
things. "The kingdom of God is righteous- 
ness, peace, joy." Righteousness, of course, 
is just doing what is right. Any boy who does 
what is right has the kingdom of God within 
him. Any boy who, instead of being quarrel- 
some, lives at peace with other boys, has the 
kingdom of God within him. Any boy whose 
heart is filled with joy because he does what 
is right, has the kingdom of God within him. 
The kingdom of God is not going to religious 
meetings, and hearing strange religious experi- 
ences: the kingdom of God is doing what is 
right — living at peace with all men, being 
filled with joy in the Holy Ghost. 

Boys, if you are going to be Christians, be 
Christians as boys, and not as your grand- 
mothers. A grandmother has to be a Chris- 
tian as a grandmother, and that is the right 
and the beautiful thing for her ; but if you can- 
not read your Bible by the hour as your grand- 
mother can, or delight in meetings as she can, 
don't think you are necessarily a bad boy. 
When you are your grandmother's age you 
will have your grandmother's kind of religion. 
Meantime, be a Christian as a boy. Live a 
boy's life. Do the straight thing; seek the 
kingdom of righteousness and honor and 
truth. Keep the peace with the boys about 
you, and be filled with the joy of being a loyal, 



110 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

and simple, and natural, and boy -like servant 
of Christ. 

You can very easily tell a house, or work- 
shop, or an office, where the kingdom of God 
is not. The first thing you see in that place is 
that the "straight thing" is not always done. 
Customers do not get fair play. You are in 
danger of learning to cheat and to lie. Bet- 
ter, a thousand times, to starve than to stay in 
a place where you cannot do what is right. 

Or, when you go into your workshop, you 
find everybody sulky, touchy, and ill-tempered ; 
everybody at dagger's drawn with everybody 
else; some of the men not on speaking terms 
with some of the others, and the whole feel of 
the place miserable and unhappy. The king- 
dom of God is not there, for it is peace. It is 
the kingdom of the Devil that is anger and 
wrath and malice. 

If you want to get the kingdom of God into 
your workshop, or into your home, let the 
quarreling be stopped. Live in peace and har- 
mony and brotherliness with every one. For 
the kingdom of God is the kingdom of brothers. 
It is a great society, founded by Jesus Christ, of 
all the people who try to be like Him, and live 
to make the world better and sweeter and hap- 
pier. Wherever a boy is trying to do that, in 
the house or in the street, in the workshop or 
on the baseball field, there is the kingdom of 
God. And every boy, however small or ob- 
scure or poor, who is seeking that, is a mem- 
ber of it. You see now, I hope, what the 
kingdom is. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. Ill 

Arithmetic. 

I pass, therefore, to the second head : What 
was it? " Arithmetic. " Are there any Arith- 
metic words in this text? " Added,' ' said one 
boy. Quite right, added. What other arith- 
metic word? " First.' ' Yes, first— " first," 
"added." Now, don't you think you could 
not have anything better to seek "first" than 
the things I have named — to do what is right, 
to live at peace, and be always making those 
about you happy? You see at once why Christ 
tells us to seek these things first — because 
they are the best worth seeking. Do you 
know anything better than these three things, 
anything happier, purer, nobler? If you do, 
seek them first. But if you do not, seek first 
the kingdom of God. I am not here this after- 
noon to tell you to be religious. You know 
that. I am not here to tell you to seek the 
kingdom of God. I have come to tell you to 
seek the kingdom of God first. First. Not 
many people do that. They put a little 
religion into their life — once a week, perhaps. 
They might just as well let it alone. It is not 
worth seeking the kingdom of God unless we 
seek it first. Suppose you take the helm out 
of a ship, and hang it over the bow, and send 
that ship to sea, will it ever reach the other 
side? Certainly not. It will drift about any- 
how. Keep religion in its place, and it will 
take you straight through life, and straight to 
your Father in Heaven when life is over. 
But if you do not put it in its place, you may 



112 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

just as well have nothing to do with it. 
Religion out of its place in a human life is the 
most miserable thing in the world. There is 
nothing that requires so much to be kept in 
its place as religion, and its place is what? 
second? third? * 4 First. " Boys, carry that 
home with you to-day — first the kingdom of 
God. Make it so that it will be natural to you 
to think about that the very first thing. 

There was a boy in Glasgow apprenticed to 
a gentleman who made telegraphs. The gen- 
tleman told me this himself. One day this boy 
was up on the top of a four-story house with a 
number of men fixing up a telegraph wire. 
The work was all but done. It was getting 
late, and the men said they were going away 
home, and the boy was to nip off the ends of 
the wire himself. Before going down they 
told him to be sure to go back to the work- 
shop, when he was finished, with his master's 
tools. "Do not leave any of them lying 
about, whatever you do," said the foreman. 
The boy climbed up the pole and began to nip 
off the ends of the wire. It was a very cold 
winter night, and the dusk was gathering. 
He lost his hold and fell upon the slates, 
slid down, and then over and over to the 
ground below. A clothes-rope, stretched 
across the 4 'green' ' on to which he was just 
about to fall, caught him on the chest and 
broke his fall ; but the shock was terrible, and 
he lay unconscious among some clothes upon 
the green. An old woman came out; seeing 
her rope broken and the clothes all soiled, 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 113 

thought the boy was drunk, shook him, 
scolded him, and went off for the policeman. 
And the boy with the shaking came back to 
consciousness, rubbed his eyes, and got upon 
his feet. What do you think he did? He stag- 
gered, half blind, away up the stairs. He 
climbed the ladder. He got on to the roof of 
the house. He gathered up his tools, put 
them into his basket, took them down, and 
when he got to the ground again, fainted dead 
away. Just then the policeman came, saw 
there was something seriously wrong, and car- 
ried him away to the hospital, where he lay 
for some time. I am glad to say he got bet- 
ter. What was his first thought at that ter- 
rible moment? His duty. He was not think- 
ing of himself; he was thinking about his mas- 
ter. First, the kingdom of God. 

But there is another arithmetic word. What 
is it? "Added. " There is not one boy here 
who does not know the difference between 
addition and subtraction. Now, that is a very 
important difference in religion, because — and 
it is a very strange thing — very few people 
know the difference when they begin to talk 
about religion. They often tell boys that if 
they seek the kingdom of God, everything else 
is going to be subtracted from them. They 
tell them they are going to become gloomy, 
miserable, and will lose everything that makes 
a boy's life worth living — that they will have 
to stop baseball and story-books, and become 
little old men, and spend all their time in 
going to meetings and in singing hymns. 

8 Drummond 



114 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

Now, that is not true. . Christ never said any- 
thing like that. Christ says we are to " seek 
first the kingdom of God," and everything 
else worth having is to be added unto us. If 
there is anything I would like you to take 
away with you this afternoon, it is these two 
arithmetic words — " first" and " added. " I do 
not mean by added that if you become 
religious you are all going to become rich. 
Here is a boy, who, in sweeping out the shop 
to-morrow morning, finds sixpence lying 
among the orange-boxes. Well, nobody has 
missed it. He puts it in his pocket, and it 
begins to burn a hole there. By breakfast- 
time he wishes that sixpence were in his mas- 
ter's pocket. And by and by he goes to his 
master. He says (to himself, and not to his 
master,) "I was at the Boys' Brigade yester- 
day, and I was to seek first that which was 
right." Then he says to his master, " Please, 
sir, here is sixpence that I found upon the 
floor." The master puts it in the "till." 
What has the boy got in his pocket? Noth- 
ing ; but he has got the kingdom of God in his 
heart. He has laid up treasure in heaven, 
which is of infinitely more worth than six- 
pence. Now, that boy does not find a shilling 
on his way home. I have known that happen, 
but that is not what is meant by "adding. " 
It does not mean that God is going to pay him 
in his own coin, for He pays in better coin. 

Yet I remember once hearing of a boy who 
was paid in both ways. He was very, very 
poor. He lived in a foreign country, and his 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 115 

mother said to him one day that he must go 
into the great city and start in business, and 
she took his coat and cut it open and sewed 
between the lining and the coat forty golden 
dinars, which she had saved up for many 
years to start him in life. She told him to 
take care of robbers as he went across the 
desert ; and as he was going out of the door 
she said: "My boy, I have only two words for 
you — ' Fear God, and never tell a lie. ' ' ' The 
boy started off, and toward evening he saw 
glittering in the distance the minarets of the 
great city, but between the city and himself 
he saw a cloud of dust, it came nearer ; pres- 
ently he saw that it was a band of robbers. 
One of the robbers left the rest and rode 
toward him, and said: "Boy, what have you 
got?" And the boy looked him in the face and 
said: "I have forty golden dinars sewed up in 
my coat." And the robber laughed and 
wheeled round his horse and rode away back. 
He would not believe the boy. Presently 
another robber came, and he said: "Boy, 
what have you got?" "Forty golden dinars 
sewed up in my coat." The robber said: 
"The boy is a fool," and wheeled his horse 
and rode away back. By and by the robber 
captain came, and he said: "Boy, what have 
you got?" "I have forty golden dinars sewed 
up in my coat ' ' And the robber dismounted 
and put his hand over the boy's breast, felt 
something round, counted one, two, three, 
four, five, till he counted out the forty golden 
coin. He looked the boy in the face, and said: 



116 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

"Why did you tell me that?" The boy said: 
"Because of God and my mother. ' ' And the 
robber leaned on his spear and thought, and 
said: "Wait a moment." He mounted his 
horse, rode back to the rest of the robbers, and 
came back in about five minutes with his dress 
changed. This time he looked not like a rob- 
ber, but like a merchant. He took the boy up 
on his horse and said : * * My boy, I have long 
wanted to do something for my God and for 
my mother, and I have this moment renounced 
my robber's life. I am also a merchant. I 
have a large business house in the city. I 
want you to come and live with me, to teach 
me about your God ; and you will be rich, and 
your mother some day will come and live with 
us. " And it all happened. By seeking first 
the kingdom of God, all these things were 
added unto him. 

Boys, banish for ever from your minds the 
idea that religion is subtraction. It does not 
tell us to give things up, but rather gives us 
something so much better that they give them- 
selves up. When you see a boy on the street 
whipping a top, you know, perhaps, that you 
could not make that boy happier than by giv- 
ing him a top, a whip, and half an hour to 
whip it. But next birthday, when he looks 
back, he says, "What a goose I was last year 
to be delighted with a top ; what I want now 
is a baseball bat. ' ' Then when he becomes an 
old man he does not care in the least for a base- 
ball bat; he wants rest, and a snug fireside, 
and a newspaper every day. He wonders how 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 117 

he could ever have taken up his thoughts with 
baseball bats and whipping tops. Now, when 
a boy becomes a Christian, he grows out of 
the evil things one by one — that is to say, if 
they are really evil — which he used to set his 
heart upon (of course I do not mean baseball 
bats, for they are not evils) ; and so instead of 
telling people to give up things, we are safer 
to tell them to "seek first the kingdom of 
God, " and then they will get new things and 
better things, and the old things will drop off 
of themselves. This is what is meant by the 
"new heart. " It means that God puts into us 
new thoughts and new wishes, and we become 
quite different boys. 

Grammar. 

Lastly, and very shortly. What was the 
third head? "Grammar." Right: Grammar. 
Now, I require a clever boy to answer the next 
question. What is the verb? "Seek." Very 
good. "Seek." What mood is it in? "Im- 
perative mood." What does that mean? 
^Command." You boys of the Boys' Brigade 
know what commands are. What is the sol- 
dier's first lesson? "Obedience." Have you 
obeyed this command? Remember the imper- 
ative mood of these words, "Seek first the 
kingdom of God/' This is the command of 
your King. It must be done. I have been 
trying to show you what a splendid thing it is; 
what a reasonable thing it is; what a happy 
thing it is; but beyond all these reasons it is a 
thing that must be done, because we are com- 



118 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

manded to do it by our Captain. It is one of 
the finest things about the Boys* Brigade that 
it always appeals to Christ as its highest officer, 
and takes its command from Him. Now, there 
is His command to seek first the kingdom of 
God. Have you done it? "Well," I know some 
boys will say, 44 we are going to have a good time, 
enjoy life, and then we are going to seek — last 
— the kingdom of God. " Now that is mean; 
it is nothing else than mean for a boy to take 
all the good gifts that God has given him, and 
then give Him nothing back in return but his 
wasted life. 

God wants boys' lives, not only their souls. 
It is for active service soldiers are drilled 
and trained and fed and armed. That is why 
you and I are in the world at all — not to pre- 
pare to go out of it some day ; but to serve God 
actively in it now. It is monstrous and shame- 
ful and cowardly to talk of seeking the king- 
dom last. It is shirking duty, abandoning 
one's rightful post, playing into the enemy's 
hand by doing nothing to turn his flank. 
Every hour a kingdom is coming in your 
heart, in your home, in the world near you, be 
it a kingdom of darkness or a kingdom of 
light. You are placed where you are, in a 
particular business, in a particular street, to 
help on there the kingdom of God. You can- 
not do that when you are old and ready to die. 
By that time your companions will have fought 
their fight, and lost or won. If they lose, will 
you not be sorry that you did not help them? 
Will you not regret that only at the last you 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 119 

helped the kingdom of God? Perhaps you will 
not be able to do it then. And then your life 
has been lost indeed. 

Very few people have the opportunity to 
seek the kingdom of God at the end. Christ, 
knowing all that, knowing that religion was a 
thing for our life, not merely for our death-bed, 
has laid this command upon us now: "Seek 
first the kingdom of God. ' ' I am going to 
leave you with this text itself. Every Brig- 
ade boy in the world should obey it. 

Boys, before you go to work to-morrow, be- 
fore you go to sleep to-night, before you go to 
the Sunday-school this afternoon, before you 
go out of the door of the City Hall, resolve 
that, God helping you, you are going to seek 
first the kingdom of God. Perhaps some boys 
here are deserters ; they began once before to 
serve Christ, and they deserted. Come back 
again, come back again to-day. Others have 
never enlisted at all. Will you not do it now? 
You are old enough to decide. And the grand- 
est moment of a boy's life is that moment when 
he decides to 

Seeft first tbe ftina&om of <3o&* 



120 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 



DEALING WITH DOUBT. 

There is a subject which I think we as work- 
ers amongst young men cannot afford to keep 
out of sight — I mean the subject of 4 'Doubt." 
We are forced to face that subject. We have 
no choice. I would rather let it alone; but 
every day of my life I meet men who doubt, 
and I am quite sure that most of you have 
innumerable interviews every year with men 
who raise skeptical difficulties about religion. 
Now, it becomes a matter of great practical 
importance that we should know how to deal 
wisely with these men. Upon the whole, I 
think these are the best men in the country. 
I speak of my own country. I speak of the 
universities with which I am familiar, and I 
say that the men who are perplexed — the men 
who come to you with serious and honest diffi- 
culties — are the best men. They are men of 
intellectual honesty, and cannot allow them- 
selves to be put to rest by words, or phrases, 
or traditions, or theologies, but who must get 
to the bottom of things for themselves. And 
if I am not mistaken, Christ was very fond 
of these men. The outsiders always interested 
Him, and touched Him. The orthodox people 
— the Pharisees — He was much less interested 
in. He went with publicans and sinners — with 




1 He went with publicans and sinners. 

Druminond's Addresses. 



-Page 120. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 121 

people who were in revolt against the respect- 
ability, intellectual and religious, of the day. 
And following Him, we are entitled to give 
sympathetic consideration to those whom He 
loved and took trouble with. 

First, let we speak for a moment or two 
about the origin of doubt. In the first place, 
we are born questioners. Look at the wonder- 
ment of a little child in its eyes before it can 
speak. The child's great word when it begins 
to speak is, "Why?" Ever)' child is full of 
every kind of questions, about every kind of 
thing that moves, and shines, and changes, in 
the little world in which it lives. That is the 
incipient doubt in the nature of man. Respect 
doubt for its origin. It is an inevitable thing. 
It is not a thing to be crushed. It is a part of 
man as God made him. Heresy is truth in 
the making, and doubt is the prelude of knowl- 
edge. 

Secondly: The world is a Sphinx. It is a 
vast riddle — an unfathomable mystery ; and 
on every side there is temptation to question- 
ing. In every leaf, in every cell of every leaf, 
there are a hundred problems. There are ten 
good years of a man's life in investigating 
what is in the leaf, and there are five good 
years more in investigating the things that are 
in the things that are in the leaf. God has 
planned the world to incite men to intellec- 
tual activity. 

Thirdly: The instrument with which we at- 
tempt to investigate truth is impaired. Some 
say it fell, and the glass is broken. Some say 



122 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

prejudice, heredity or sin, have spoiled its 
sight, and have blinded our eyes and deadened 
our ears. In any case the instruments with 
which we work upon truth, even in the 
strongest men, are feeble and inadequate to 
their tremendous task. 

And in the fourth place, all religious truths 
are doubtable. There is no absolute proof 
for any one of them. Even that fundamental 
truth — the existence of a God — no man can 
prove by reason. The ordinary proof for the 
existence of God involves either an assump- 
tion, argument in a circle, or a contradiction. 
The impression of God is kept up by expe- 
rience; not by logic. And hence, when the 
experimental religion of a man, of a commu- 
nity, or of a nation, wanes, religion wanes — 
their idea of God grows indistinct, and that 
man, community or nation becomes infidel. 
Bear in mind, then, that all religious truths 
are doubtable — even those which we hold most 
strongly. 

What does this brief account of the origin of 
doubt teach us? It teaches us great intel- 
lectual humility. It teaches us sympathy and 
toleration with all men who venture upon the 
ocean of truth to find out a path through it 
for themselves. Do you sometimes feel your- 
self thinking unkind things about your fellow- 
students who have intellectual difficulty? I 
know how hard it is always to feel sympathy 
and toleration for them ; but we must address 
ourselves to that most carefully and most relig- 
iously. If my brother is short-sighted, I must 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 123 

not abuse him or speak against him ; I must 
pity him, and if possible try to improve his 
sight or to make things that he is to look at so 
bright that he cannot help seeing. But never 
let us think evil of men who do not see as 
we do. From the bottom of our hearts let us 
pity them, and let us take them by the hand 
and spend time and thought over them, and 
thought over them, and try to lead them to the 
true light. 

What has been the Church's treatment of 
doubt in the past? It has been very simple. 
4 'There is a heretic Burn him! ,, That is all. 
4 'There is a man who has gone off the road. 
Bring him back and torture him!" We have 
got past that physically; have we got past it 
morally? What does the modern Church say 
to a man who is skeptical? Not 44 Burn him!" 
but 44 Brand him" 44 Brand him! — call him a 
bad name." And in many countries at the 
present time a man who is branded as a heretic 
is despised, tabooed, and put out of religious 
society, much more than if he had gone wrong 
in morals. I think I am speaking within the 
facts when I say that a man who is unsound is 
looked upon in many communities with more 
suspicion and with more pious horror than a 
man who now and then gets drunk. 44 Burn 
him!" 44 Brand him!" 44 Excommunicate him!" 
That has been the Church's treatment of 
doubt, and that is perhaps to some 
extent the treatment which we ourselves 
are inclined to give to the men who 
cannot see the truths of Christianity as 



124 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

we see them. Contrast Christ's treatment 
of doubt. I have spoken already of His strange 
partiality for the outsiders — for the scattered 
heretics up and down the country ; of the care 
with which He loved to deal with them, and 
of the respect in which He held their intel- 
lectual difficulties. Christ never failed to dis- 
tinguish between doubt and unbelief. Doubt 
is can't believe; unbelief is won't believe. 
Doubt is honesty; unbelief is obstinacy. 
Doubt is looking for light; unbelief is content 
with darkness. Loving darkness rather than 
light — that is what Christ attacked, and at- 
tacked unsparingly. But for the intellectual 
questioning of Thomas, and Philip, and Nico- 
demus, and the many others who came to Him 
to have their great problems solved, He was 
respectful and generous and tolerant. 

And how did He meet their doubts? The 
Church, as I have said, says, "Brand him!" 
Christ said, "Teach him." He destroyed by 
fulfilling. When Thomas came to Him and 
denied His very resurrection, and stood before 
Him waiting for the scathing words and lash- 
ing for his unbelief, they never came. They 
never came. Christ gave him facts — facts. 
No man can go around facts. Christ said, 
"Behold My hands and My feet." The great 
god of science at the present time is a fact. It 
works with facts. Its cry is, "Give me facts." 
Found anything you like upon facts and we 
will believe it. The spirit of Christ was the 
scientific spirit. He founded His religion upon 
facts; and He asked all men to found their 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 125 

religion upon facts. Now, gentlemen, get up 
the facts of Christianity, and take men to the 
facts. Theologies — and I am not speaking 
disrespectfully of theology; theology is as 
scientific a thing as any other science of facts 
— but theologies are human versions of Divine 
truths, and hence the varieties of the versions, 
and the inconsistencies of them. I would 
allow a man to select whichever version of this 
truth he liked afterwards; but I would ask 
him to begin with no version, but go back to 
the facts and base his Christian life upon that. 
That is the great lesson of the New Testament 
way of looking at doubt — of Christ's treatment 
of doubt. It is not " Brand him!" — but lov- 
ingly, wisely, and tenderly to teach him. 
Faith is never opposed to reason in the New 
Testament; it is opposed to sight. You will 
find that a principle worth thinking over. 
Faith is never opposed to reason in the New 
Testament, but to sight. 

Well, now ; with these principles in mind as 
to the origin of doubt, and as to Christ's treat- 
ment of it, how are we ourselves to deal with 
our fellow-students who are in intellectual 
difficulty? In the first place, I think we must 
make all the concessions to them that we con- 
scientiously can. When a doubter first encoun- 
ters you he pours out a deluge of abuse of 
churches, and ministers, and creeds, and Chris- 
tians. Nine-tenths of what he says is probably 
true. Make concessions. Agree with him. It 
does him good to unburden himself of these 
things. He has been cherishing them for 



126 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

years — laying them up against Christians, 
against the Church, and against Christianity; 
and now he is startled to find the first Chris- 
tian with whom he has talked over the thing 
almost entirely agrees with him. We are, of 
course, not responsible for everything that is 
said in the name of Christianity ; but a man 
does not give up medicine because there are 
quack doctors, and no man has a right to give 
up his Christianity because there are spurious 
or inconsistent Christians. Then, as I have 
already said, creeds are human versions of 
Divine truths; and we do not ask a man to 
accept all the creeds, any more than we ask 
him to accept all the Christians. We ask him 
to accept Christ, and the facts about Christ, 
and the words of Christ. But you will find 
the battle is half won when you have endorsed 
the man's objections, and possibly added a 
great many more to the charges which he has 
against ourselves. These men are in revolt 
against the kind of religion which we exhibit 
to the world — against the cant that is taught 
in the name of Christianity. And if the men 
that have never seen the real thing — if you 
could show them that, they would receive it as 
eagerly as you do. They are merely in revolt 
against the imperfections and inconsistencies 
of those who represent Christ to the world. 

Second : Beg them to set aside, by an act of 
will, all unsolved problems: such as the prob- 
lem of the origin of evil, the problem of the 
Trinity, the problem of the relation of human 
will and predestination, and so on — problems 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 127 

which have been investigated for thousands of 
years without result — ask them to set those 
problems aside as insoluble in the meantime, 
just as a man who is studying mathematics 
may be asked to set aside the problem of squar- 
ing a circle. Let him go on with what can be 
done, and what has been done, and leave out 
of sight the impossible. You will find that 
will relieve the skeptic's mind of a great deal 
of unnecessary cargo that has been in his 
way. 

Thirdly : Talking about difficulties, as a rule, 
only aggravates them. Entire satisfaction to 
the intellect is unattainable about any of the 
greater problems, and if you try to get to the 
bottom of them by argument, there is no bot- 
tom there ; and, therefore, you make the mat- 
ter worse. But I would say what is known, 
and what can be honestly and philosophically 
and scientifically said about one or two of the 
difficulties that the doubter raises, just to show 
him that you can do it — to show him that you 
are not a fool — that you are not merely groping 
in the dark yourself, but you have found what- 
ever basis is possible. But I would not go 
around all the doctrines. I would simply do 
that with one or two; because the moment 
you cut off one, a hundred other heads will 
grow in its place. It would be a pity if all 
these problems could be solved. The joy of 
the intellectual life would be largely gone. I 
would not rob a man of his problems, nor 
would I have another man rob me of my prob- 
lems. They are the delight of life, and the 



128 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

whole intellectual world would be stale and 
unprofitable if we knew everything. 

Fourthly — and this is the great point : Turn 
away from the reason, and go into the man's 
moral life. I don't mean, go into his moral 
life and see if the man is living in conscious 
sin, which is the great blinder of the eyes — I 
am speaking now of honest doubt ; but open a 
new door into the practical side of man's 
nature. Entreat him not to postpone life and 
his life's usefulness until he has settled the 
problems of the universe. Tell him those 
problems will never all be settled ; that his life 
will be done before he has begun to settle 
them ; and ask him what he is doing with his 
life meantime. Charge him with wasting his 
life and his usefulness; and invite him to deal 
with the moral and practical difficulties of the 
world, and leave the intellectual difficulties as 
he goes along. To spend time upon these is 
proving the less important before the more 
important; and, as the French say, "The good 
is the enemy of the best." It is a good thing 
to think ; it is a better thing to work — it is a 
better thing to do good. And you have him 
there, you see. He can't get beyond that. 
You have to tell him, in fact, that there are 
two organs of knowledge : the one reason, the 
other obedience. And now tell him, as he has 
tried the first and found the little in it, just for 
a moment or two to join you in trying the 
second. And when he asks whom he is to 
obey, you tell him there is but One, and lead 
him to the great historical figure, who calls all 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 129 

men to Him: the one perfect life — the one 
Savior of mankind — the one Light of the 
world. Ask him to begin to obey Christ ; and, 
doing His will, he shall know of the doctrine 
whether it be of God. 

That, I think, is about the only thing you can 
do with a man : to get him into practical con- 
tact with the needs of the world, and to let him 
lose his intellectual difficulties meantime. 
Don't ask him to give them up altogether. 
Tell him to solve them afterward one by one 
if he can, but meantime to give his life to 
Christ and his time to the kingdom of God. 
And, you see, you fetch him completely around 
when you do that. You have taken him away 
from the false side of his nature, and to the 
practical and moral side of his nature ; and for 
the first time in his life, perhaps, he puts 
things in their true place. He puts his nature 
in the relations in which it ought to be, and 
he then only begins to live. And by obedience 
— by obedience — he will soon become a learner 
and pupil for himself, and Christ will teach 
him things, and he will find whatever prob- 
lems are solvable gradually solved as he goes 
along the path of practical duty. 

Now, let me, in closing, give a couple of in- 
stances of how to deal with specific points. 
The commonest thing that we hear said nowa- 
days by young men is, "What about evolution? 
How am I to reconcile my religion, or any 
religion, with the doctrine of evolution?" 
"That upsets more men than perhaps anything 
else at the present hour. How would you deal 

9 Drummond 



130 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

with it? I would say to a man that Christian- 
ity is the further evolution. I don't know any 
better definition than that. It is the further 
evolution — the higher evolution. I don't start 
with him to attack evolution. I don't start 
with him to defend it. I destroy by fulfilling 
it. I take him at his own terms. He says 
evolution is that which pushes the man on 
from the simple to the complex, from the 
lower to the higher. Very well; that is what 
Christianity does. It pushes the man farther 
on. It takes him where nature has left him, 
and carries him on to heights which on the 
plain of nature he could never reach. That is 
evolution. "Lead me to the Rock that is 
higher than I." That is evolution. It is the 
development of the whole man in the higher 
directions — the drawing out of his spiritual 
being. Show an evolutionist that, and you 
take the wind out of his sails. "I came not to 
destroy." Don't destroy his doctrine — per- 
haps you can't — but fulfil it. Put a larger 
meaning into it. 

The other instance — the next commonest 
perhaps — is the question of miracles. It is 
impossible, of course, to discuss that now — 
miracles; but that question is thrown at my 
head every second day: 4 'What do you say to a 
man when he says to you, 'Why do you be- 
lieve in miracles?' " I say, "Because I have 
seen them." He says, "When?" I say, 
4 'Yesterday." He says, 44 Where?" 44 Down 
such-and-such a street I saw a man who was a 
drunkard redeemed by the power of an unseen 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 131 

Christ and saved from sin. That is a mir- 
acle. ' ' The best apologetic for Christianity is 
a Christian. That is a fact which the man 
cannot get over. There are fifty other argu- 
ments for miracles, but none so good as that 
you have seen them. Perhaps you are one 
yourself. But take you a man and show him 
a miracle with his own eyes. Then he will 
believe. 



132 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 



PREPARATION FOR LEARNING. 

Before an artist can do anything the instru- 
ment must be tuned. Our astronomers at this 
moment are preparing for an event which hap- 
pens only once or twice in a lifetime : the total 
eclipse of the sun in the month of August. 
They have begun already. They are making 
preparations. At chosen stations in different 
parts of the world they are spending all the 
skill that science can suggest upon the con- 
struction of their instruments ; and up to the 
last moment they will be busy adjusting them; 
and the last day will be the busiest of all, be- 
cause then they must have the glasses and the 
mirrors polished to the last degree. They 
have to have the lenses in place and focused 
upon this spot before the event itself takes 
place. 

Everything will depend upon the instru- 
ments which you bring to this experiment. 
Everything will depend upon it ; and, there- 
fore, fifteen minutes will not be lost if we each 
put our instruments into the best working 
order we can. I have spoken of lenses, and 
that reminds me that the instrument which we 
bring to bear upon truth is a compound thing. 
It consists of many parts. Truth is not a part 
of the intellect alone ; it is a product of the 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 133 

whole nature. The body is engaged in it, and 
the mind, and the soul. 

The body is engaged in it. Of course, a 
man who has his body run down, or who is 
dyspeptic, or melancholy, sees everything 
black, and disordered, and untrue. But I am 
not going to dwell upon that. Most of you 
seem in pretty fair working order so far as 
your bodies are concerned ; only it is well to 
remember that we are to give our bodies a liv- 
ing sacrifice — not a half-dead sacrifice, as some 
people seem to imagine. There is no virtue in 
emaciation. I don't know if you have any 
tendency in that direction in America, but 
certainly we are in danger of dropping into it 
now and then in England, and it is just as well 
to bear in mind our part of the lens — a very 
compound and delicate lens — with which we 
have to take in truth. 

Then comes a very important part: the intel- 
lect — which is one of the most useful servants 
of truth ; and I need not tell you as students, 
that the intellect will have a great deal to do 
with your reception of truth. I was told that 
it was said at these conferences last year, that 
a man must crucify his intellect. I venture to 
contradict the gentleman who made that state- 
ment. I am quite sure no such statement 
could ever have been made in your hearing — 
that we were to crucify our intellects. We 
can make no progress without the full use of 
all the intellectual powers that God has en- 
dowed us with. 

But more important than either of these is 



134 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

the moral nature — the moral and spiritual 
nature. Some of you remember a sermon of 
Robertson of Brighton, entitled "Obedience 
the Organ of Spiritual Knowledge." A very 
startling title! — " Obedience the Organ of 
Spiritual Knowledge. " The Pharisees asked 
about Christ: "Howknoweth this man letters, 
never having learned? ,, How knoweth this 
man, never having learned? The organ of 
knowledge is not nearly so much mind, as the 
organ that Christ used, namely, obedience; 
and that was the organ which He Himself 
insisted upon when He said: "He that willeth 
to do His will shall know of the doctrine 
whether it be of God. ' ' You have all noticed, 
of course, that the words in the original are: 
"If any man will do His will, he shall know of 
the doctrine. " It doesn't read, "If any do 
His will," which no man can do perfectly; but 
if any man be simply willing to do His will — 
if he has an absolutely undivided mind about 
it — that man will know what truth is and know 
what falsehood is; a stranger will he not fol- 
low. And that is by far the best source of 
spiritual knowledge on every account — obedi- 
ence to God — absolute sincerity and loyalty in 
following Christ. "If any man do His will he 
shall know" — a very remarkable association of 
knowledge, a thing which is usually considered 
quite intellectual, with obedience, which is 
moral and spiritual. 

But even although we use all these three 
different parts of the instrument, we have not 
at all got at the complete method of learning.. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 135 

There is a little preliminary that the astrono- 
mer has to do before he can make his observa- 
tion. He has to take the cap off his telescope. 
Many a man thinks he is looking at truth when 
he is only looking at the cap. Many a time I 
have looked down my microscope, and thought 
I was looking at the diatom for which I had 
long been searching, and found I had simply 
been looking at a speck of dust upon the lens 
itself. Many a man thinks he is looking at 
truth when he is only looking at the specta- 
cles he has put on to see it with. He is look- 
ing at his own spectacles. Now, the common 
spectacles that a man puts on — I suppose the 
creed in which he has been brought up — if a 
man looks at that, let him remember that he 
is not looking at truth: he is looking at his 
own spectacles. There is no more important 
lesson that we have to carry with us than that 
truth is not to be found in what I have been 
taught. That is not truth. Truth is not what 
I have been taught. If it were so, that would 
apply to the Mormon, it would apply to the 
Brahman, it would apply to the Buddhist. 
Truth would be to everybody just what he had 
been taught. Therefore let us dismiss from 
our minds the predisposition to regard that 
which we have been brought up in as being 
necessarily the truth. I must say it is very 
hard to shake one's self free altogether from 
that. I suppose it is impossible. 

But you see the reasonableness of giving 
up that as your view of truth when you come 
to apply it all around. If that were the defi- 



136 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

nition of truth, truth would be just what one's 
parents were — it would be a thing of heredi- 
tary transmission, and not a thing absolute in 
itself. Now, let me venture to ask you to take 
that cap off. Take that cap off now, and make 
up your minds you are going to look at truth 
naked — in its reality as it is, not as it is re- 
flected through other minds, or through any 
theology, however venerable. 

Then there is one thing I think we must be 
careful about, and that is besides having the 
cap off, and having all the lenses clean and in 
position — to have the instrument rightly 
focused. Everything may be right, and yet 
when you go and look at the object, you see 
things altogether falsely. You see things not 
only blurred, but you see things out of propor- 
tion. And there is nothing more important 
we have to bear in mind in running our eye 
over successive theological truths, or religious 
truths, than that there is a proportion in those 
truths, and that we must see them in their 
proportion, or we see them falsely. A man 
may take a dollar or a half-dollar and hold it 
to his eye so closely that he will hide the sun 
from him. Or he may so focus his telescope 
that a fly or a boulder may be as large as a 
mountain. A man may hold a certain doc- 
trine, very intensely — a doctrine which has 
been looming upon his horizon for the last six 
months, let us say, and which has thrown 
everything else out of proportion, it has be- 
come so big itself. Now let us beware of dis- 
tortion in the arrangement of the religious 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 137 

truths which we hold. It is almost impossible 
to get things in their true proportion and 
symmetry, but this is the thing we must be 
constantly aiming at. We are told in the 
Bible to "add to your faith virtue, and to vir- 
tue knowledge, and to knowledge balance," 
as the word literally means — balance. It is a 
word taken from the orchestra, where all the 
parts — the sopranos, the basses, the altos, and 
the tenors, and all the rest of them — must be 
regulated. If you have too much of the bass, 
or too much of the soprano, there is want of 
harmony. That is what I mean by the want 
of proper focus — by the want of proper balance 
— in the truths which we all hold. It will never 
do to exaggerate one truth at the expense of 
another, and a truth may be turned into a 
falsehood very, very easily, by simply being 
either too much enlarged or too much dimin- 
ished. I once heard of some blind men who 
were taken to see a menagerie. They had gone 
around the animals, and four of them were 
allowed to touch an elephant as they went past. 
They were discussing afterwards what kind of 
a creature the elephant was. One man, who 
had touched its tail, said the elephant was like 
a rope. Another of the blind men, who had 
touched his hind limb, said, "No such thing! 
the elephant is like the trunk of a tree. " 
Another, who had felt its sides, said, "That is 
all rubbish. An elephant is a thing like a 
wall." And the fourth, who had felt its ear, 
said that an elephant was like none of those 
things; it was like a leather bag. Now, men 



138 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

look at truth at different bits of it, and they 
see different things, of course, and they are 
very apt to imagine that the thing which the} r 
have seen is the whole affair — the whole thing. 
In reality, we can only see a very little bit at 
a time; and we must, I think, learn to believe 
that other men can see bits of truth as well as 
ourselves. Your views are just what you see 
with your own eyes; and my views are just 
what I see; and what I see depends on just 
where I stand, and what you see depends on 
just where you stand; and truth is very much 
bigger than an elephant, and we are very much 
blinder than any of those blind men as we 
come to look at it. 

Christ has made us aware that it is quite 
possible for a man to have ears and hear noth- 
ing, and to have eyes and see not. One of the 
disciples saw a great deal of Christ, and he 
never knew Him. "Have I been so long time 
with you, Philip, and yet hast thou not known 
Me?" "He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
Father also." Philip had never seen Him. 
He had been looking at his own spectacles, 
perhaps, or at something else, and had never 
seen Him. If the instrument had been in 
order, he would have seen Christ. And I 
would just add this one thing more : the test of 
value of the different verities of truth de- 
pends upon one thing : whether they have or 
have not a sanctifying power. That is another 
remarkable association in the mind of Christ 
— of sanctification with truth — thinking and 
holiness — not to be found in any of the sciences 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 139 

or in any of the philosophies. It is peculiar to 
the Bible. Christ said, "Sanctify them 
through Thy truth. Thy word is truth/' 
Now, the value of any question — the value of 
any theological question — depends upon 
whether it has a sanctifying influence. If it 
has not, don't bother about it. Don't let it 
disturb your minds until you have exhausted 
all truths that have sanctification within them. 
If a truth makes a man a better man, then let 
him focus his instrument upon it and get all 
the acquaintance with it he can. If it is the 
profane babbling of science, falsely so called, 
or anything that has injurious effect upon the 
moral and spiritual nature of man, it is better 
let alone. And above all, let us remember to 
hold the truth in love. That is the most sanc- 
tifying influence of all. And if we can carry 
away the mere lessons of toleration, and leave 
behind us our censoriousness, and criticalness, 
and harsh judgments upon one another, and 
excommunicating of everybody except those 
who think exactly as we do, the time we shall 
spend here will not be the least useful parts of 
our lives. 



140 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 



WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN? 



Young men are learning to respect more, 
perhaps, than ever young men have done, the 
word * ' Christian. " I have seen the time 
when it was synonymous with cant and tin- 
reality and strained feeling and sanctimoni- 
ousness. But although that day is not quite 
passed yet, it is passing. I heard this defini- 
tion the other day of a Christian man by cynic 
— "A Christian man is a man whose great aim 
in life is a selfish desire to save his own soul, 
who, in order to do that, goes regularly to 
church, and whose supreme hope is to get to 
Heaven when he dies. " This reminds one of 
Professor Huxley's examination paper in 
which the question was put — "What is a lob- 
ster?" One student replied that a lobster was 
a red fish, which moves backwards. The ex- 
aminer noted that this was a very good answer, 
but for three things. In the first place a lob- 
ster was not a fish ; second it was not red ; and 
third it did not move backwards. If there is 
anything that a Christian is not, it is one who 
has a selfish desire to save his own soul. The 
one thing which Christianity tries to extirpate 
from a man's nature is selfishness even though 
it be the losing of his own soul. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 141 

Christianity, as we understand it from Christ, 
appeals to the generous side of a young man's 
nature, and not to the selfish side. In the new 
version of the New Testament the word "soul" 
is always translated in this connection by the 
word "life. " That marks a revolution in the 
popular theology, and it will make a revolu- 
tion in every Young Man's Christian Associa- 
tion in the country where it comes to be seen 
that a man's Christianity does not consist in 
merely saving his own soul, but in sanctifying 
and purifying the lives of his fellow-men. We 
are told in the New Testament that Christian- 
ity is leaven, and "leaven" comes from the 
same root-word as lever, meaning that which 
raises up, which elevates; and a Christian 
young man is a man who raises up or elevates 
the lives of those round about him. We are 
also told that Christianity is salt, and salt is 
that which saves from corruption. What is it 
that saves the life of the world from being 
utterly rotten, but the Christian elements 
that are in it? Matthew Arnold has said, 
"Show me ten square miles in any part of the 
world outside Christianity where the life of 
man and the purity of woman are safe, and I 
will give Christianity up. ' ' In no part of the 
world is there any such ten square miles out- 
side Christianity. Christian men are the salt 
of the earth in the most literal sense. They, 
and they alone, keep the world from utter de- 
struction. 

I want to say a word here about the Young 
Men's Christian Associations. Many have 



142 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

criticised them. They have been the target 
for a great deal of abuse. Many of the best 
young men have sneered at them, and turned 
up their noses at them, and denounced them. 
I am speaking with absolute sympathy and re- 
spect, and even enthusiasm, for Young Men's 
Christian Associations. But I will turn for 
one instant upon those men who turn against 
them, and tell them that it is not breadth that 
leads them to do that, but what one might call 
the narrowness of breadth — that breadth which 
denounces intolerance, and which is itself too 
intolerant to tolerate intolerance. And, as 
some one says, it is easier to criticise the best 
thing superbly than to do the smallest thing 
indifferently. 

It is very easy to criticise the methods and 
aims and men of the Young Men's Christian 
Associations. If, instead of looking on and 
criticising those who know a thing or two, 
those who think they are wiser, and that they 
have the whole truth, would throw themselves 
in among others and back them and try to 
work alongside of them, they would get per- 
haps their breath tempered by earnestness and 
by zeal, because the narrow man has much to 
contribute to the Christian cause, perhaps 
more than the broad man. But it needs all 
kinds of people to make a world; it needs all 
kinds of people to make a church, and every 
type of young men a Christian Association ; 
and the greatest mistake of all is to have 
every man stamped in the same stamp, so that 
if you met him in a railway train one hundred 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 143 

miles off, you would know him as a Y. M. C. 
A. man. I would like to find many who 
would not wear the badge so pronouncedly, 
that every one should know them at a glance. 

There is only one great character in the world 
that can really draw out all that is best in man. 
He is so far above all others in influencing men 
for good that He stands alone. That man was 
the founder of Christianity. To be a Christian 
man is to have that character for our ideal in 
life, to live under its influence, to do what He 
would wish us to do, to live the kind of life 
He would have lived in our house, and had He 
our day's routine to go through. It would 
not, perhaps, alter the forms of our life, but it 
would alter the spirit and aims and motives of 
our life, and the Christian man is he who in 
that sense lives under the influence of Jesus 
Christ. 

Now, there is nothing that a young man 
wants for his ideal that is not found in Christ. 
You would be surprised when you come to 
know who Christ is, if you have not thought 
much about it, to find how He will fit in with 
all human needs, and call out all that is best 
in man. The highest and manliest character 
that ever lived was Christ. One incident I 
often think of and wonder. You remember, 
when He hung upon the cross, there was 
handed up to Him a vessel containing a stupe- 
fying drug, supplied by a kind society of ladies 
in Jerusalem, who always sent it to criminals 
when being executed. And that stupefying 
drug was handed up to Christ's lips. And we 



144 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

read, "When He tasted thereof He would not 
drink." I have always thought that one of 
the most heroic actions I have ever read of. 
But that was only one very small side of 
Christ's nature. He can be everything that a 
man wants. Paul tells us that if we live in 
Christ we are changed into His image. All 
that a man has to do, then, to be like Christ, 
is simply to live in friendship with Christ, and 
the character follows. 

But it is only one of the aims of Christianity 
to make the best men. The next thing Christ 
wants to do is to make the best world. And 
He tries to make the best world by setting the 
best men loose upon the world to influence it 
and reflect Him upon it. In 1874 a religious 
movement began in Edinburgh University 
among the students themselves, that has since 
spread to some of the best academic institu- 
tions in America. The students have a hall, 
and there they meet on Sundays, or occasionally 
on week-days, to hear addresses from their 
professors, or from outside eminent men, on 
Christian topics. There is no committee; 
there are no rules; there are no reports. 
Every meeting is held strictly in private, and 
any attempt to pose before the world is sternly 
discouraged. No paragraphs are put into the 
journals; no addresses are reported. The 
meetings are private, quiet, earnest, and what- 
soever student likes may attend them. That 
is all. It is not an organization in the ordi- 
nary sense, it is a "leaven. " In all the schools 
it is the best men who take most part in the 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 145 

movement, and among the schools it is the 
medical side which furnishes the greatest num- 
ber of students to the meetings. Some of the 
most zealous have taken high honors in their 
examinations, and some have been in the first 
class of university athletes. It is not a move- 
ment that has laid hold of weak or worthless 
students whom nobody respects, but one that 
is maintained by the best men in every depart- 
ment. The first benefit is to the students 
themselves. Take Edinburgh, with about 
4,000 students drawn from all parts of the 
world, and living in rooms with no one caring 
for them. Taken away from the moral sup- 
port of their previous surroundings, they went 
to the bad in hundreds. It is now found that 
through this movement they work better, and 
that a greater percentage pass honorably 
through the university portals into life. The 
religious meetings, it is to be observed, are 
never allowed to interfere with the work of the 
students. The second result is to be seen in 
what are called university settlements. A few 
men will band themselves together and rent a 
house in the lower parts of the city and live 
there. They do no preaching, no formal 
evangelization work; but they help the sick 
and they arrange smoking concerts, and con- 
tribute to the amusement of their neighbors. 
They simply live with the people, and trust 
that their example will produce a good effect. 
Three years ago they printed and distributed 
among themselves the following " Programme 
of Christianity :" — "To bind up the broken- 

10 Drummond 



146 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

hearted, to give liberty to the captives, to com- 
fort all that mourn, to give beauty for ashes, 
the garment of praise for the spirit of heavi- 
ness. " I suppose there are few of us with 
broken hearts, but there are other people in 
the world beside ourselves, and underneath all 
the gayety of the city there is not a street in 
which there are not men and women with 
broken hearts. Who is to help these people? 
No one can lift them up in any way except 
those who are living the life of Christ, and it 
is their privilege and business to bind up the 
broken-hearted. 

I want to urge the claims of the Christian 
ministry on the strength and talent of our 
youth. I find a singular want of men in the 
Christian ministry, and I think it would be at 
least worth while for some of you to look 
around, to look at the men who- are not filling 
the churches, to look at the needs of the 
crowds who throng the streets, and see if you 
could do better with your life than throw your- 
self into that work. The advantage of the 
ministry is that a man's whole life can be 
thrown into the carrying out of that pro- 
gramme without any deduction. Another ad- 
vantage of the ministry is that it is so poorly 
paid that a man is not tempted to cut a dash 
and shine in the world, but can be meek and 
lowly in heart, like his Master. It is enough 
for a servant to be like his master, and there 
is a great attraction in seeking obscurity, even 
isolation, if one can be following the highest 
ideal. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 147 

With regard to the question, how you shall 
begin the Christian life, let me remind you 
that theology is the most abstruse thing in the 
world, but that practical religion is the sim- 
plest thing. If any of you want to know how 
to begin to be a Christian, all I can say is that 
you should begin to do the next thing you find 
to be done as Christ would have done it. If 
you follow Christ the "old man" will die of 
atrophy, and the "new man" will grow day by 
day under His abiding friendship. 



148 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 



THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 



I will give a note or two, pretty much 
by way of refreshing the memory about the 
Bible and how to look at it. 

First: The Bible came out of religion not 
religion out of the Bible. The Bible is a pro- 
duct of religion, not a cause of it. The war 
literature of America, which culminated, I sup- 
pose, in the publication of President Grants 
life, came out of the war; the war did not 
come out of the literature. And so in the dis- 
tant past, there flowed among the nations of 
heathendom a small warm stream, like the 
Gulf Stream in the cold Atlantic — a small 
stream of religion ; and now and then at inter- 
vals, men, carried along by this stream, uttered 
themselves in words. The historical books 
came out of facts ; the devotional books came 
out of experiences ; the letters came out of cir- 
cumstances; and the Gospels came out of all 
three. That is where the Bible came from. 
It came out of religion ; religion did not come 
out of the Bible. You see the difference. 
The religion is not, then, in the writing alone; 
but in those facts, experiences, circumstances, 
in the history and development of a people led 
and taught by God. And it is not the words 
that are inspired so much as the men. 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 149 

Secondly: These men were authors; they 
were not pens. Their individuality comes out 
on every page they wrote. They were differ- 
ent in mental and literary style; in insight; 
and even the same writer differs at different 
times. II. Thessalonians, for example, is con- 
siderably beneath the level of Romans, and 
III. John is beneath the level of I. John. A 
man is not always at his best. These writers 
did not know they were writing a Bible. 

Third: The Bible is not a book; it is a 
library. It consists if sixty-six books. It is a 
great convenience, but in some respects a great 
misfortune, that these books have always been 
bound up together and given out as one book 
to the world, when they are not ; because that 
has led to endless mistakes in theology and in 
practical life. 

Fourth : These books, which make up this 
library, written at intervals of hundreds of 
years, were collected after the last of the writ- 
ers was dead — long after — by human hands. 
Where were the books? Take the New Testa- 
ment. There were four lives of Christ. One 
was in Rome ; one was in Southern Italy ; one 
was in Palestine ; one in Asia Minor. There 
were twent}7--one letters. Five were in Greece 
and Macedonia; five in Asia; one in Rome. 
The rest were in the pockets of private indi- 
viduals. Theophilus had acts. They were 
collected undesignedly. For example, the 
letter to the Galatians was written to the 
Church in Galatia. Somebody would make a 
copy or two, and put it into the hands of the 



150 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

members of the different churches, and they 
would find their way not only to the churches 
in Galatia, but after an interval to nearly all 
the churches. In those days the Christians 
scattered up and down through the world, 
exchanged copies of those letters, very much 
as geologists up and down the world exchange 
specimens of minerals at the present time, or 
entomologists exchange speciments of butter- 
flies. And after a long time a number of the 
books began to be pretty well known. In the 
third century the New Testament consisted of 
the following books: the four Gospels, Acts, 
thirteen letters of Paul, I. John, I. Peter; and 
in addition, the Epistles of Barnabas and 
Hermas. This was not called the New Testa- 
ment, but the Christian Library. Then these 
last books were discarded. They ceased to be 
regarded as upon the same level as the others. 
In the fourth century the canon was closed — 
that is to say, a list was made up of the books 
which were to be regarded as canonical. And 
then long after that they were stitched 
together and made up into one book — hundreds 
of years after that. Who made up the com- 
plete list? It was never formally made up. 
The bishops of the different churches would 
draw up a list each of the books that they 
thought ought to be put into this Testament. 
The churches also would give their opinion. 
Sometimes councils would meet and talk it 
over — discuss it. Scholars like Jerome would 
investigate the authenticity of the different 
documents, and there came to be a general 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 151 

consensus of the churches on the matter. But 
no formal closing of the cannon was ever 
attempted. 

And lastly : All religions have their sacred 
books, just as the Christians have theirs. 
Why is it necessary to remind ourselves of 
that? If you ask a man why he believes such 
and such a thing, he will tell you, Because it is 
in the Bible. If you ask him, "How do you 
know the Bible is true?" he will probably 
reply, "Because it says so. " Now, let that 
man remember that the sacred books of all the 
other religions make the same claim ; and while 
it is quite enough among ourselves to talk 
about a thing being true because it is in the 
Bible, we come in contact with outsiders, and 
we have to meet the skepticism of the day. 
We must go far deeper than that. The relig- 
ious books of the other religions claim to be 
far more divine in their origin than do ours. 
For example, the Mohammedans claim for the 
Koran — a large section of them, at least — 
that it was uncreated, and that it lay before 
the throne of God from the beginning of time. 
They claim it was put in the hands of the angel 
Gabriel, who brought it down to Mahomet, and 
dictated it to him, and allowed him at long 
intervals to have a look at the original book 
itself — bound with silk and studded with pre- 
cious stones. That is a claim of much higher 
Divinity than we claim for our book ; and if 
we simply have to rely upon the Bible's testi- 
mony to its own verity, it is for the same rea- 
son the Mohammedan would have you believe 



152 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

his book, and the Hindu would have you put 
your trust in the Vedas. That is why thorough 
Bible study is of such importance. We can 
get to the bottom of truth in itself, and be 
able to give a reason for the faith that is in us. 
Now may I give you, before I stop, just a 
couple of examples of how the Bible came out 
of religion, and not religion out of the Bible? 
Take one of the letters. Just see how it came 
out of the circumstances of the time. The 
first of the letters that was written will do very 
well as an example. It is the ist Epistle to the 
Thessalonians. In the year 52 Paul went to 
Europe. He spent three Sundays in Thessa- 
lonica, created a great disturbance by his 
preaching, and a riot sprang up, and his life 
was in danger. He was smuggled out of the 
city at night — not, however, before having 
founded a small church. He was unable to go 
back to Thessalonica, although he tried it two 
or three times; but he wrote a letter. That is 
the first letter to the Thessalonians. You see 
how it sprang out of the circumstances of the 
time. Take a second example. Let us take 
one of the lives of Christ. Suppose you take 
the life recorded by Mark. Now, from inter- 
nal evidences you can make out quite clearly 
how it was written, by whom it was written, 
and to whom it was written. You understand 
at once it was written to a Roman public. If 
I were writing a letter to a red Indian I would 
make it very different from a letter I would 
write to a European. Now, Mark puts in a 
number of points which he would not if he 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 153 

had been writing to Greeks. For example, 
Mark almost never quotes prophecy. The 
Romans did not know anything about proph- 
ecy. Then, he gives little explanation of Jew- 
ish customs. When I was writing home I had 
to give some little explanations of American 
customs — for example, Commencement Day. 
When Mark writes to Rome about things hap- 
pening farther East, he gives elaborate expla- 
nations. Again, Mark is fond of Latin words — 
writing to the Latins, who could understand 
them. He talks about " centurion,' ' "praetor- 
mm," and others. Then, he always turns 
Jewish money into Roman money, just as I 
should say a book, if I were w r riting to Europe 
about it, cost two shillings, instead of fifty 
cents. Mark, for example, says, "two mites, 
which make a codrantes. " He refers to the 
coins which the Romans knew. In these ways 
we find out that the Bible came out of the cir- 
cumstances and the places and the times in 
which it was written. Then if we will we can 
learn where Mark got his information, to a 
large extent. It is an extremely interesting 
study. I should like to refer to Gocet's "New 
Testament Studies," w T here you will get this 
worked out. Let me just indicate to you how 
these sources of information are arrived at — 
the principal sources of information. There 
are a number of graphic touches in the book 
which indicate an eye-witness. Mark himself 
could not have been the eye-witness ; and yet 
there are a number of graphic touches which 
show that he got his account from an eye-wit- 



154 DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 

ness. You will find them, for example, in 
Mark iv. 3S; x. 50; vi. 31; vii. 34. You will 
find also graphic touches indicating an ear-wit- 
ness — as if the voice lingered in the mind of the 
writer. For example, the retention of A ramaic 
in v. 41 ; and in vii, 34 — "Talitha cumi; Damsel, 
I say unto thee, arise." He retained the Ara- 
maic words Christ said, as I would say in Scot- 
land, "My wee lassie, rise up. " The very 
words lingered in his ear, and he put them in 
the original. Then there are occasional 
phrases indicating the moral impression pro- 
duced — v. 15; x. 24; x. 32. Now, Mark him- 
self was not either the eye-witness or ear- wit- 
ness. There is internal evidence that he got 
his information from Peter. We know very 
well that Mark was an intimate friend of 
Peter's When Peter came to Mark's house 
in Jerusalem, after he got out of prison, the 
very servant know his voice, so that he must 
have been well known in the house. There- 
fore he was a friend of Mark's. The coloring 
and notes seem to be derived from Peter. 
There is a sense of wonder and admiration 
which you find all through the book, very like 
Peter's way of looking at things — i. 27; i. 33; 
i. 45; ii. 12; v. 42; and a great many others. 
But, still more interesting, Mark quotes the 
words, "Get thee behind Me, Satan," which 
were said to Peter's shame, but he omits the pre- 
ceding words said to his honor — "Thou art 
Peter. On this rock," and so on. Peter had 
learned to be humble when he was telling Mark 
about it. Compare Mark viii. 27-33, with Mat- 



DRUMMOND'S ADDRESSES. 155 

thew's account — xvi. 13-33. Mark also omits 
the fine achievement of Peter — walking on the 
lake. When Peter was talking to Mark, he never 
said anything about it. Compare vi. 50 with 
Matthew's account — xiv. 28, And Mark alone 
records the two warnings given to Peter by 
the two cock- Growings, making his fall the 
more inexcusable. See Mark xiv. 30; also the 
68th verse and the 7 2d. Peter did not write 
the book; we know that, because Peter's style 
is entirely different. None of the four Gospels 
have the names of the writers attached to them. 
We have had to find all these things out ; but 
Mark's Gospel is obviously made up of notes 
from Peter's evangelistic addresses. 

So we see from these simple examples how 
human a book the Bible is, and how the Divin- 
ity in it has worked through human means. 
The Bible, in fact, has come out of religion; 
not religion out of the Bible. 



ff . B. Boot fmwn Fobuchtiohs 

ONE HUNDRED SELECTED POPULAR STANDARD BOOKS, 

MASTERPIECES OF LITERATURE, BY THE 

WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS AUTHORS 

Printed From New, Perfect Plates 



BOUND IN THREE SERIES, AS FOLLOWS: 

THE IVORY SERIES 

SEE LIST OF TITLES ON NEXT PAGE 

Three original full page illustrations and portrait of the, 
author in each book. Beautifully illuminated title page. Printed 
with the greatest care on fine laid paper, from clear, open-faced 
type. Bound in superb style with white vellum cloth and imported 
fancy paper sides, artistically stamped in gold, with gold top and 
silk ribbon marker. Each book in neat covered bos. 16mo size. 
An exquisite series of gift books. Price, 50C. 

THE UNIVERSITY SERIES 

SEE LIST OF TITLES ON NEXT PAGE 

An unexcelled library of standard works. Bound in a beautiful 
and durable heavy ribbed cloth, handsomely stamped in gilt and 
two colors of ink. A perfect portrait of the author and three full 
page original illustrations in each volume. Title page in colors, 
Printed on fine laid paper, from new, clear type. Wrapped in neat 
colored printed wrappers. 16mo size. Price, 35c. 

THE AMARANTH SERIES 

SEE LIST OF TITLES ON NEXT PAGE 

The latest, handsomest, and best selected series of standard 
books at a popular price. Printed on good paper from new type, 
and bound in strong cloth, artistically stamped with original 
design in two colors of ink. Printed colored wrappers. 16mo size. 
Price, 25c. 

All of the above series are for sale by leading booksellers 
everywhere. Ask for them by the name of the series, or 
will be sent postpaid, on receipt of price, by the publishers. 

W. B. CONKEY COMPANY, CHICAGO 

WORKS: Hammond, Ind. 



W. B. CONKEY COMPANY'S PUBLICATIONS 



Abbe* Constantin Halevy 

Adventures of a Brownie. ..Mulock 

All Aboard Optic 

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 

Carroll 

An Attic Philosopher in Paris 

Souvestre 

Autobiography of Benjamin 

Franklin 

Autocrat of the Breakfast Table 

Holmes 

Bacon's Essays Bacon 

Barrack Room Ballads. . .Kipling 
Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush 

Maclaren 

Black Beauty Sewall 

Blithedale Romance. .Hawthorne 

Boat Club Optic 

Bracebridge Hall Irving 

Brooks' Addresses 

Browning's Poems Browning 

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 

Byron 

Child's History of England 

Dickens 

Cranford Gaskell 

Crown of Wild Olives Ruskin 

Daily Food for Christians 

Departmental Ditties Kipling 

Dolly Dialogues Hope 

Dream Life Mitchell 

Drummond's Addresses 

Drummond 

Emerson's Essays, Vol. 1 

Emerson 

Emerson's Essays, Vol. 2 

Emerson 

Ethics of the Dust Ruskin 

Evangeline Longfellow 

Flower Fables Alcott 

Gold Dust Yonge 

Heroes and Hero Worship, Carly le 

Hiawatha Longfellow 

House of Seven Gables 

Hawthorne 

House of the Wolf Weyman 

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow 

Jerome 

Idylls of the King Tennyson 

Imitation of Christ 

Thos. a'Kempis 

In Memoriam Tennyson 

John Halifax Mulock 

Kept for the Master's Use 

Havergal 

Kidnapped Stevenson 

King of the Golden River.. Ruskin 

Laddie 

Lady of the Lake Scott 

Lalla Rookh Moore 

Let Us Follow Him.. .Sienkiewicz 
Light of Asia Arnold 



78. Light That Failed. . . .Kipling 

79. Locksley Hall Tennyson 

80. Longfellow's Poems 

Longfellow 

81. Lorna Doone Blackmore 

82. Lowell's Poems Lowell 

83. Lucile Meredith 

88. Marmion Scott 

89. Mosses from an Old Manse 

Hawthorne 

93. Natural Law in the Spiritual 

World Drummond 

94. Now or Never Optic 

97. Paradise Lost Milton 

98. Paul and Virginia 

Saint Pierre 

99. Pilgrim's Progress Bunyan 

100. Plain Tales from the Hills 

Kipling 

101. Pleasures of Life Lubbock 

102. Prince of the House of David 

Ingraham 

103. Princess Tennyson 

104. Prueand I Curtis 

107 Queen of the Air Ruskin 

110. Rab and His Friends. . . Brown 

111. Representative Men. .Emerson 

112. Reveries of a Bachelor 

Mitchell 

113. Rollo in Geneva Abbott 

114. Rollo in Holland Abbott 

115. Rollo in London Abbott 

118. Rollo in Naples Abbott 

117. Rollo in Paris Abbott 

118. Rollo in Rome Abbott 

119. Rollo in Scotland Abbott 

120. Rollo in Switzerland. . .Abbott 

121. Rollo on the Atlantic... Abbott 

122. Rollo on the Rhine Abbott 

123. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 

Fitzgerald 

128. Sartor Resartus Carlyle 

129. Scarlet Letter Hawthorne 

130 Sesame and Lilies Ruskin 

131. Sign of the Four Doyle 

132. Sketch Book Irving 

133. Stickit Minister Crockett 

140. Tales from Shakespeare 

C. and Mary Lamb 

141. Tanglewood Tales.. Hawthorne 

142. True and Beautiful Ruskin 

143. Three Men in a Boat. .Jerome 

144. Through the Looking Glass 

Carroll 

145. Treasure Island Stevenson 

146. Twice Told Tales.. Hawthorne 

150. Uncle Tom's Cabin Stowe 

154. Vicar of Wakefield..Goldsmith 

158. Whittier's Poems.... Whittier 

159. Wide, Wide World . . . .Warner 

160. Window in Thrums Barrie 

161. Wonder Book Hawthorne 



W. B. Donkey Sbwhy's Pdbliohtiqhs 

COMPLETE LIST OF THE POETIC AND PROSE 

WORKS OP 

Ella Wheeler Wilcox 



POEMS OF PASSION. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. Presentation 
Edition— white vellum, gold top, $1.50. Presentation 
Edition — half calf, gold top, $2.50. 

POEMS OF PASSION. Quarto, cloth. Illustrated 
Edition, $1.50. 

POEMS OF PASSION. Pocket Edition, Illustrated— 16mo, 
cloth, 75 cents; full morocco, gold edges, $2.50. 
Human nature is less of a mystery after the reading of this book. 
"Only a woman of genius could produce such a remarkable 

work."— Illustrated London News. 

MAURINE AND OTHER POEMS. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. 
Presentation Edition — white vellum, gold top, $1.50. 
Presentation Edition — half calf, gold top, $2.50. 
Beautiful thoughts and healthy inspiration in every line. 
"Maurine is an ideal poem about a perfect woman."— The South. 

POEMS OF PLEASURE. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. Presenta- 
tion Edition — white vellum, gold top, $1.50. Presenta- 
tion Edition — half calf, gold top, $2.50. 
These poems make life doubly sweet and cheerful. 
"Mrs. Wilcox is an artist with a touch that reminds one of 

Lord Byron's impassionate strains."— Paris Register. 

THREE WOMEN. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. Presentation 
Edition — art binding, gold top, boxed, $1.50. 

Her latest and greatest poem. This marvelous narrative of 
thrilling interest depicts the lives of three good and beautiful 
women in every phase of weakness, passion, pride, love, sympathy 
and tenderness. 

AN AMBITIOUS MAN. (Prose.) 12mo, cloth, $1.00. 

11 Vivid realism stands forth from every page of this fascinating 
book."— Every Day. 



WORKS OF ELLA WHEELER WILCOX (Continued) 

HOW SALVATOR WON AND OTHER POEMS. 12mo, 
cloth, $1.00. Presentation Edition — white vellum, gold 
top, $1.50. Presentation Edition — half calf, gold top, 
$2.50. 

A choice collection of recitations, specially compiled for read- 
ers and impersonators. 

"Her name is a household word. Her great power lies in depict- 
ing human emotions ; and in handling that grandest of all passions 
— love — she wields the pen of a master." — The Saturday Record. 

CUSTER AND OTHER POEMS. Handsomely illustrated. 
l2mo, cloth, $1.00. Presentation Edition- -white vellum, 
gold top, $1.50. Presentation Edition— half calf, gold 
top. $2.50. 

A grand epic of the exploits and massacre of the immortal 
Custer. 

"One cannot help gaining new impetus for the spiritual exist- 
ence from coming in contact, mentally, with such ideal sentiments 
and emotions as this rarely gifted poetess voices in magnificent 
verse." — Universal Truth, 

AN ERRING WOMAN'S LOVE. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. 
Presentation Edition — white vellum, gold top, $1.50. 
Presentation Edition — half calf, gold top. $2.50. 

"Power and pathos characterize this magnificent poem. A 
deep understanding of life and an intense sympathy are beauti- 
fully expressed."— Tribune. 

MEN, WOMEN AND EMOTIONS. (Prose.) 12mo, heavy 
enameled paper cover, 50 cents , English cloth, $1.00. 
A skillful analysis of social habits, customs and follies. 
"Her fame has reached all parts of the world, and her popular- 
ity seems to grow with each succeeding year." — American Newsman, 

THE BEAUTIFUL LAND OF NOD. (Poems, songs and 

stories.) With over sixty original illustrations. Quarto. 

cloth, $1.00. 

The delight of the nursery. A charming mother's book. 

"The foremost baby's book of the world." — New Orleans 
Picayune, 

PRESENTATION SETS. Poems of Passion, Maurine, 
Poems of Pleasure, How Salvator Won. and Custer, are 
supplied in sets of 3, 4, or 5 titles, as may be desired, in 
neat boxes, without extra charge. 

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX ' S WORKS are for sale by leading book- 
sellers everywhere, or will be sent postpaid on receipt of price by 
the Publishers. 

W. B. CONKEY COMPANY, Chicago 



AUG 23 190Q 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: March 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



LIBRARY OF CONGRES 




4 035 102 7 



<«!^ RY 0F CONGRESS 



029 557 461 6 



